Heart of Iron

Chapter 12

It took a few minutes for the fire wagon, drawn by four stout, small horses with shaggy fetlocks, to arrive at the tavern. The long yellow tongues of flame wagged from every window and licked the blistering walls. The paint burned and peeled, and the stone underneath charred. I bit my lips, seized by the ancestral memory of Moscow burning at the time of Napoleon — even though I did not experience it myself, I heard stories from my aunt and my mother often enough to be able to taste ash and crumbling brick every time Napoleon was mentioned. Now I tasted it regardless.

I waited with everyone else, my teeth chattering, as the firemen unrolled the hose and brought out a pump. The water in the wagon’s barrel was frozen, and one of the firemen had to crack the ice with the blunt end of an axe.

They pumped a thin, uncertain stream that occasionally rose as high as the second story windows but quickly abated, and then reared up again. The flames guttered and went out when the water hit them, then quickly grew to their former size. It was becoming obvious the fire and water could chase each other like this forever, neither gaining an upper hand, as the tavern gradually charred and grew disfiguring tumors of ice. The water froze the moment it touched any portion of wall not in flames. As I watched the icy gray lumps grow, I realized how cold it was — how cold I felt. My twisted ankle, so swollen by then it filled my boot as tightly as rising dough fills a too-small bowl, was thankfully numb; so was the rest of me. At least, this is the only explanation I could find for the sense of curious calm that enveloped me. I thought of Jack, who was not among the throng outside; surely, he wouldn’t be trapped inside and burned to death — he would be strong enough to break the door if it was locked from the outside, he could jump from any window and do so without hurting himself… he must have gone to the train, I said to myself. I should hurry there too.

There was no chance of finding a carriage near the sluggish inferno, so I hobbled away, my injured foot numb enough to put a modicum of weight on it. I wondered as I hobbled who had started the fire. I assumed, it was the English, but it seemed possible that Nightingale would not be above having the Nikolashki or some other unsavory branch of secret police doing as she bid.

It occurred to me I had seen neither foreigners nor plain clothed policemen at the tavern — the arsonists either escaped before I got there, or found their way out the back of the building. Would they chase me? I could not run, and felt too tired and distraught to hide. It wasn’t quite despair that hung over me like a thick veil; it was the sense of resignation. If I were captured I would probably feel only relief. I stumbled along, smelling the pungent scent of smoke permanently trapped in my clothes and hair, hoping for either a carriage or a policeman to come along and take me somewhere I could sit down and finally stop running.

I had not thought about the university in days, and now I yearned to be there. It was becoming increasingly plain I might never make it back at all let alone in time for the third quarter. If I survived this adventure and returned home, I only hoped the rector would be merciful and allow me to resume my studies next year. Otherwise, I would be expelled, tossed out. If that were to happen, death by the hand of Dame Nightingale would be certainly preferable.

I managed to hail a carriage; a sullen freedman and his large, bay horse studied me with suspicion and a remarkably similar shine of dark, bulging eyes, but agreed to take me to the station. My breath clouded the air inside, as the driver sang to himself and clapped his mittened hands. His horse, evidently encouraged by this, snuffled and neighed.

The train was still there. I found the compartment empty of Jack but also empty of policemen or spies or any other foes; only the two Chinese gentlemen, Kuan Yu and Liu Zhi nodded and smiled at me. I settled in my seat and immediately pressed my forehead to the frozen window, to thaw out a clear patch large enough to observe the goings-on on the platform.

I worried about Jack, although I could not imagine him dead — such a little fire, such an obvious and feeble arson were designed not to kill but to scare him, to drive him away — I imagined him running, leaping tall buildings, leading the pursuit away from me… something he would do. Sweet old Jack.

Every passing second resonated in my mind like a heavy stroke of Grandfather’s clock that used to decorate my father’s study when I was an infant — I still remembered the heavy, weighty sound. I felt the ghostly clock hand move, slow and inexplicable, its blade shredding my heart with worry, each little step another opportunity lost.

I attempted to distract myself by checking on my ankle, but the boot would not come off because of the swelling, and I gave up soon enough.

I wished I hadn’t insisted on taking my own room — I would have known where Jack was, if he was still alive, and whether I should stay in Yekaterinburg and wait for him or continue on my way. The remorse tore at me, and yet there was no fixing it. It was the same truth I had realized only gradually after my papa had passed away, so long ago: the truth that some things could not be fixed no matter how much you turned them in your head and wished they would be otherwise. The realization often descended early in the morning, in that fuzzy domain between sleep and wakefulness, where — despite what your dreams still whispered in your head — those who were dead would remain dead. Grief was always freshest in the mornings, but I now allowed the memory of it to distract me from my current misery.

“Where is your friend?” Kuan Yu asked.

“I don’t know,” I answered. In my distress, I could not even start making up a plausible lie, and so instead I told them we had been separated while in town, and now I couldn’t decide whether to continue or not.

“Of course not,” Liu Zhi said. “You don’t leave a friend behind — there will be another train tomorrow.”

“But we are in a hurry,” I said. “Besides, I worry those people you helped us push off the train will come back.”

“All the more reason to not abandon your friend,” Kuan Yu said, the confusion written on his honest, broad face that reminded me of Anastasia at that moment. “What sort of a soldier are you?”

“Not a very good one,” I said, simultaneously afraid and giddy with the thought that between them Liu Zhi and Kuan Yu were generating enough guilt to chase me off the train, and wondered how far would my shame push me. The role of embarrassment in human history was vastly underestimated. As I picked up my satchel and hobbled on my distended ankle toward the doors of the carriage, it occurred to me that many instances of heroism, acknowledged in books and history records and Jack’s beloved penny dreadfuls, were likely to have been inspired purely by embarrassment, by fear of looking foolish or cowardly in front of total strangers. So I smiled and waved at Kuan Yu and Liu Zhi. “It was nice meeting you. Have a safe and pleasant journey.”

They waved back and whispered to each other fiercely, their words obscured by their language as well as hissing of the steam — the train was getting ready to leave, and its breath, a cloud of milk in the clear water of the winter air, curdled and billowed all around me as soon as I stepped onto the platform. I thought I heard voices calling after me, but I was too fatigued and frightened and hurt to turn back and ask what they wanted.

There will be another train tomorrow, I consoled myself. If I cannot find Jack, I can go by myself — stay on the train, make friends, remain in a full carriage so there are always eyes and ears around me. There were advantages in going by myself, too: no one to argue with over giving the letter to the Taipings and insisting on Qing legitimacy. It also occurred to me that whether Dame Nightingale had Jack or whether he was simply lost in Yekaterinburg, now that we were apart we would not be as easy to find as before — a tall Englishman and a girl dressed as a hussar were slightly less obvious apart than together. In fact, I thought, I wouldn’t have needed Jack at all if only I wasn’t so frightened. If only Jack did not have the documents and submarine schematics.

The train whistled and the passengers hurried aboard. I hoped with every fiber of my soul Jack would manifest somehow, that his tall figure would appear cleaving the crowd like the prow of a steamship — almost as much as I hoped he wouldn’t. It was so difficult to decide whether Jack was an asset or a liability, especially with my fear muddying my feelings further.

The train chugged, faster and faster, and I had to step away from the platform’s edge lest I be burned by the steam that poured from the stack of the locomotive and curled along the length of the train like a cloud dragon.

I was still undecided regarding how I felt or what I was going to do next — should I search for Jack or simply wait for him here? — when the locomotive gave a last mournful whistle, spooking the crows sitting on the roof of the station, like so many monks waiting for Easter service to start. The train shuddered and moved, faster, faster. It was leaving now and it was me receding behind it. I could feel myself getting smaller in the eyes of the passengers, until the train curved behind the horizon, and I disappeared from its view, as if I had never existed.

Cold and pain, resurrected from the overwhelming numbness like a particularly cantankerous phoenix, jolted me from my reverie and reassured me — rather rudely — of the existence of my mortal body. Considering the advantages of being an incorporeal spirit, I hopped on one foot toward the station building. There, I found a bench free of village women and their baskets with chickens, eggs, and minced meat pies as well as fur traders and their bundles of freshly hunted and badly smelling furs, and sat down. Rather, I let my leg give under me, and tumbled onto the bench in utter exhaustion and misery, not even caring how ungraceful I looked. It seemed like a good time to decide what to do next.

I did not want to go back to the burned tavern, not with the risk of encountering the arsonists, which happily coincided with the most sensible course of action: waiting for Jack to find me. The train station would be the most obvious place in the absence of other contingency plans. It was just common sense, I told myself, since lacking other information I had to assume he was looking for me, and thus starting to look for him would almost certainly guarantee we would never find each other.

I considered another meal of meat or cabbage pies and shuddered with disgust. Instead, I opened my satchel to work a bit on the confessional (and increasingly sentimental) letter (diary) addressed to my mother (or my aunt) in her sane (female) world. Truly, it was getting too complicated and parenthetical for its own good. Except as soon as I opened my satchel, I realized it was not there.

I cursed under my breath, using words my mother would never believe I suspected the existence of, and dug through several times. It was of no use, and I sunk back into my bench, clutching my cropped head as if I were hoping to crush it between my hands. I wouldn’t have minded so much if the letter contained only troubles of my heart; but as I written quite a bit about Wong Jun and Chiang Tse, and even though I avoided committing to paper the exact details of our task, I suspected I had referenced too many people, including Aunt Eugenia. My only consolation was the hope the letter had either burned in the tavern or was lost somewhere, kneaded by a multitude of feet into the dirty slush, at one with the city’s frozen refuse now.

The throbbing in my ankle had subsided enough to allow me a brief venture toward the back of the station, where a small sectioned area smelled of food, and two harried women with lined, drawn faces worked the woodstove and cast iron skillets, serving pancakes with butter and sour cream to the few passengers who lingered by the small wooden counter, carved with a heart and someone’s initials. There was nowhere to sit, except the usual benches of the train station, so I leaned against the wall, inhaling the smells of sizzling dough and sour milk, and feeling my mouth fill with saliva. Pancakes were sure to make everything better — their smell alone made the pain in my twisted foot almost tolerable.

I waited patiently for my turn, my hunger growing with every passing minute, so that by the time I received a scalding-hot plate with a stack of golden pancakes and a small dab of sour cream dwarfed by a spreading lake of melted butter, all thoughts other than those related to my meal became but a distant whisper deep in the recesses of my mind.

I burned my mouth with my first bite, but did not care — it was as if today’s fear in the fire, concern over Jack, and worry about the lost letter had all combined to push me toward focusing on the very basics of survival, one of which was eating. As it turned out, another instinct — and one I had been neglecting — was paying attention to my surroundings.

I regretted, at times, leaving behind the female world inhabited by my mother; I even missed the gray, ambiguous area where my Aunt Eugenia dwelled — the world of influence and responsibility, where she still wore female clothes and relied on men to exercise her influence. Now I was truly on my own, alone, and dressed as a man, ready to cut my swath through the world as men did. I gritted my teeth and felt determined, and only because of that was I able to not weep with relief when a familiar voice called out, “Poruchik!” One needed friends, I had discovered, even in the male world — especially in the male world.

Rotmistr Ivankov grinned at me, and both cornets nodded politely.

It was all that I could do not to rush over and embrace him. “Rotmistr! I wished I had had a chance to thank you for your timely intervention in Moscow. Please, join me.”

The rotmistr sat next to me, the bench creaking under his bulk, and sent the cornets to procure pancakes with a flick of his wrist. “No need, lad. You did well enough by sending those reinforcements our way.”

I nodded, grateful for his willingness to play along with my disguise, even though I suspected he could see through it as easily as Dame Nightingale. If he addressed me as “miss,” it would’ve been awkward. “I am sorry we could not stay to help.”

He waved his hand in the air dismissively. “Worry not. We can certainly understand the need to get away in a hurry. Speaking of which, where’s your friend?”

When the cornets came back with food, I told them about the fire and the missing Jack, and they nodded along, suitably concerned-looking. It was good to have friends — and the rotmistr and his cornets certainly felt like very old ones. “But how did you get here so quickly?” I asked.

The rotmistr smirked. “Remember when I complained about horses not being quick enough? Wouldn’t you know, there are now trains that carry cargo, and they take horses too.” He laughed happily and opened his arms and eyes simultaneously wide, surprised and delighted by such development. However, he stopped smiling when he saw my face. “What’s the matter, lad? Don’t you think horses might enjoy being passengers every now and again?”

I shook my head. “Nothing against your horses or your hussars, rotmistr, but I wonder why they suddenly decided to start transporting soldiers east? I thought you were on garrison duty?”

He confirmed with a nod and frowned. “I suppose freight trains would be useful for trading. It is just incidental that they used them for troops.”

“Your orders said nothing about any urgency of your journey to Turkestan then? Nothing about heightened preparedness for military action?”

He scowled. “Tell you what, son. If you’re so smart and well-connected, why don’t you join us — we are leaving tomorrow, and we can keep you company at least to Turkestan. If your friend shows up, that will be all for the good. If not, we can offer some protection. We can talk if you feel like it, too.”

“Why are you doing this for me?” I whispered, my eyes filming over and threatening to spill sudden, warm tears.

“Hussars stick together,” he said, smiling. “That’s why.”

The rotmistr (who I was by then suspecting of being my guardian angel in a hussar uniform) led me to the other side of the station, to another set of tracks. There was no platform, and the only train there was merely a few carriages long, the rest of it composed out of open carts covered with sailcloth, housing the impatient, snorting horses covered with felt and blankets to keep them warm against the Siberian winter. Through the walls made of thick wooden slats, light and resinous, I could see the horses’ breath and the small mincing steps they took in their narrow prisons, I could hear the muffled strikes of their shod hooves, iron against frozen straw, brittle as glass.

“Poor beasts,” one of the cornets (I think it was Volzhenko, younger and sadder than his doppelganger Petrovsky) said, tracing my gaze. “They want to be out of those tiny stables on wheels so bad. They want to run and to feel the dry grass against their flanks, not this cursed cold… ” He noticed the curious stare of the other cornet and let his voice trail off, to my chagrin.

I, of course, wanted to hear more — I was always intrigued by how many of my compatriots had such poetic and earnest souls below their jaded exteriors, an almost embarrassing sincerity and blazing conviction one found in certain kinds of drunks.

The rotmistr slapped my shoulder to gain my attention and almost sent me tumbling down on my hands and knees; instead, I managed an awkward hop, stepped too heavily on my injured foot, gave a loud hiss between my teeth but recovered. We stood before one of the carriages of the hussars’ train, and the rotmistr helped me climb its wrought iron ladder-steps, covered with festoons of transparent ice.

Inside, the carriage did not have compartments but merely rows of wooden benches, sparsely populated by soldiers who smoked, played cards, talked loudly, dissected pickled herrings on greasy newspapers, and washed their foot wraps in buckets of murky water. It smelled of stale sweat and mold, and I feared I would not last a day in this place — I would probably shout at someone or hit them with a wet wrap in the face or choke them by shoving a deck of card down their throat. I laughed then, and the rotmistr gave me a concerned look. “You don’t look well, poruchik,” he said. “Let’s show you to the doctor right away.”

The doctor was found in the end of the carriage, where he drank and played cards with a few soldiers. He was a small, balding man with a sharp goatee who seemed genuinely sorry to leave the game in favor of taking a look at some stranger his rotmistr had dragged in.

I sat on an empty bench and the doctor leaned in, as the rotmistr and his cornets watched on. Of course, I refused a too-close examination, and reassured him that taking a look at my ankle would be sufficient. My ankle and leg were so swollen he had to cut open the upper portion of my boot in order to remove it. I peeked at my ankle and felt immediately nauseated — it was red and black and purple, certainly not the color flesh was supposed to be.

“It’s a bad sprain,” the doctor reassured me after he contented himself with what felt like many interminable hours of poking, prodding, and twisting of the tender flesh. “It’ll heal — just stay off it, keep some ice on it, keep your boot off and your leg elevated — you don’t want blood pooling in there. You do seem to have a fever, but I suspect that it is unrelated.”

The moment the word “fever” touched my tympanic membranes, the carriage around me tilted and swam, as if the doctor’s words allowed something I had kept away from my consciousness with a sheer act of will to coalesce and take shape, to fill my ears with sticky cotton so that the din of the carriage became subdued and remote as the tide of my own blood pounded at my ears like waves of the Pacific, toward which I had been moving so slowly, so unavoidably. I leaned into the back of the bench, and felt cold sweat slithering under my uniform. The sensation of these chill, somehow greasy drops, made me want to cry about everything I had lost that day — Jack, the documents he carried, my letter, Kuan Yu and Liu Zhi, my ankle… that would be regained, of course, but still. Instead of crying, I eased into the hard wooden bench and hugged my satchel to my chest, terrified of losing anything else. I heard the rotmistr’s soft voice ordering the cornets around, and after a short pause there was a scratchy woolen blanket over me and a pillow that smelled like wet feathers thrust under my head. Large calloused hands eased me into the corner so my head rested against the pillow wedged between my cheek and the wall of the train, by the window. I felt the light diminish outside, and then it was night. The darkness brought an intensified fever and wild imaginings — there were stars exploding across my closed eyelids and I heard voices — not the hussars in the carriage but menacing voices that whispered on the very edge of my hearing in a language I could not understand but sounded unmistakably hostile. It felt as if I strained just a bit more I would understand their vague threats, but I avoided it. I dreamt and hallucinated and was buoyed by the waves of fever, until the morning came and there was weakness and drenching sweat, and a slow rumble of the moving wheels.

I slept and dreamt, and woke up to a steaming glass of tea, my fingers slipping on its sides. I drank my tea and slept again. Then I woke again and had someone help me walk to the end of the carriage, where the tiny privy (much smellier and considerably less comfortable than the one in the couchette carriage of the Trans-Siberian train) offered necessary relief. Three days had passed, and we arrived at Novonikolaevsk before I was ever cognizant enough to realize that without thinking of it much, I had left Jack behind and it was too late now to go back.

In my defense, the fever I contracted in Yekaterinburg had bound me in a delirious dream from the moment I snuggled into the blanket provided by the very thoughtful rotmistr. The rattling of wheels had separated from its meaning, from signaling movement east, and only resonated in my ears as mindless percussion, as metronome beats.

The sleep was constant and yet uneven — I was often startled from it by laughter and voices, but even those remained meaningless, inconsequential, as if mere music and not the indication of a train full of hussars. Even the neighing of the caged horses in their wooden prison right behind my carriage did not jolt me to reality. One night I thought I heard thunder but then heard the rotmistr and others talking about horses’ hooves shattering a slatted wall and two of them jumping off, breaking their legs as the train kept speeding along. I did not know whether the story was just a dream or a real memory.

In the end, I woke up three days later, when the train had stopped by a snow-covered platform, everything around us pristine and white, and for a moment I thought I was still dreaming, of some quintessentially Russian heaven. My face pressed against the window felt cold and numb — I must have been sitting like that for a while, but did not realize it until just now. The cessation of movement and sound must’ve jolted me to awareness.

Silence was too profound not to notice and I lingered in the same position, fearful of shattering it with a careless movement, with a clinking of an empty tea glass resting on the bench by my hand, ready to be sent tumbling onto the floor and splintering into shards… the image of the breaking glass was so clear in my mind, I jerked my hand away from it, to prevent it from coming true.

“Menshov,” someone said behind me. “You’re awake?”

“Yes.” Silence ruined, I sat up and rubbed my eyes with my fists. The carriage was empty, save for Cornet Volzhenko stretched on the bench behind mine, reading a volume of Pushkin’s newest poems (I disliked his newer ones, finding that the poet was growing sentimental in his advancing years.) “Where is everyone?”

“Novonikolaevsk,” the cornet replied. “Heart of Siberia. Everyone’s probably buying vodka and food off the local Buryats. The rotmistr told me to stay here, keep an eye on you.”

“Thank you,” I said. Then, “Sorry.”

“What are you sorry for? It’s no bother. I’d rather stay here, in the warmth and quiet. They’ll bring us something to eat tonight, after they’re done painting the town.” He thought a bit, looking at me as if wanting to ask something.

“I have been ill,” I said. “When the rotmistr gets back, will you ask him to speak to me? I need to find out what happened in Yekaterinburg… where my friend Mr. Bartram went.”

He nodded. “Don’t you remember, Menshov? You sprained your ankle and decided to come along with us to Krasnoyarsk. You collapsed as soon as you sat down, and there was no waking you or talking to you.”

I shrugged. “I don’t mind. It is going to sound strange, but with the fever I am not sure I made the decision myself.”

“God has a way of guiding us sometimes,” he said with a serious, deep conviction.

I felt disinclined to speculate about God’s designs, so I changed the subject. “Is there somewhere to send a letter from?”

Cornet Volzhenko shrugged. “I reckon there is a post office nearby. Novonikolaevsk is a new city still, but it has everything a city needs, although God help me if I know why the emperor decided to build it here. Then again, he named it after his brother, suitably enough.”

I couldn’t help but snicker. “You don’t care for Prince Nicholas?”

The cornet shook his head. “My father was at the Senate Square in 1825,” he said. “And he always told me it wasn’t so much that they were keen on Constantine, but rather that they were terrified of Nicholas becoming tsar-emperor. Can you even imagine such a thing?” His dark eyes opened wide and rounded in exaggerated fear. “At least now, all he has is this city named after him, frozen in winter and a stinking, mosquito-filled swamp in the summer.”

“And the Nikolashki,” I added. “His secret police — he has those too.”

“And they are not too keen on the Chinamen. Is that why you’re going to China? Spying for the emperor?”

I shook my head, relieved I did not have to lie in this instant. “Nothing like that, I assure you.”

“But you have a reason to go there, and a reason why you’re upset the Englishman is not here, with you. And why all the other English are chasing you, as they were in Moscow. And now your friend is nowhere to be found.”

“There are reasons for everything,” I said. “But we are neither spies nor traitors.”

He pinched his upper lip, the vegetation decorating it as wispy and scarce as mine, pulled on it as if testing its resilience. “I believe you, Menshov. The rotmistr seems to have taken a shine to you, and that’s good enough for me. He’s like a father to Petrovsky and myself, yeah? So he likes you — I like you, I even play nanny to you if he tells me to. But understand this: if you betray his trust, you’re dead. Boom!” His fist smashed against the wooden bench. “Nothing left but a wet spot, like a bug.”

“I see what you mean,” I said, and eyed his young but knobby fist respectfully. “Don’t worry, I hold the rotmistr in high esteem and am indebted to him for his kindnesses.”

“Damn right.” Volzhenko nodded and grinned, visibly relieved to get his worries off his chest. “Now that you’re awake, want to test that foot of yours?”

My right ankle was indeed much better; it only produced a dull ache when I put my weight on it. I was able to sew the upper of my boot back together with some string and an awl Aunt Eugenia had thoughtfully packed in my satchel — which I still held against my bosom. I wondered if the hussars had noticed how desperately I had continued to clutch it, and whether they thought there was something exceedingly valuable in it other than a couple of clean shirts and a letter written in Chinese on the back of a theatrical bill.