The Lost Souls of Angelkov (43 page)

Aleksandr Kasakov, like the other officers, had travelled to Europe in the course of previous military campaigns. The exposure to the Western world inspired the well-educated officers to seek change in their own repressed country. But the revolutionary movement these men started was easily crushed, and, in actuality, soured Nicholas I on liberalism for his people. The Decembrists paid dearly for their attempts to abolish serfdom and ensure a better life for the downtrodden
peasants. Five of the officers were executed, while most of the others were sentenced to a life of exile in Siberia.

The Tsar, determined to make an example of these men, attempted to wipe out all trace of them. Wives of convicts were usually allowed to follow them to Siberia, but Church and State declared that the Decembrists’ wives were now widows and could marry freely, without benefit of a divorce. Some wives refused this edict, and did follow their husbands, but had to give up all their worldly possessions, and, even worse, were not allowed to take their children. Should their husbands die before them, they were told they would have to live out their own lives in Siberia.

Aleksandr Kasakov’s wife could not face leaving their two young daughters behind forever. He fully supported her decision to stay, and gave her his blessing from the prison in St. Petersburg’s Peter and Paul Fortress. He went further, urging her to marry again so that his children would have a father. He did not want to see those he most loved punished for his crimes.

He served a year of hard labour in a mine in one of the far corners of the Siberian province of Irkutsk. He worked chained to a wheelbarrow, surrounded by atrocities and death. In his mid-thirties, he learned that true oppression works by turning its victims against each other.

After the year of back-breaking labour, he was ordered to live out his banishment in the thinly populated area of eastern Siberia, in Chita. The town was five hundred miles to the east of the largest city in Siberia, Irkutsk, near the crossroads to Mongolia and China. Tiny Chita was inhabited by many Buryats—Buddhists who brought their culture and religion across the nearby border with Mongolia.

Aleksandr was a rag-covered skeleton when he arrived in Chita. He imagined that exile to a windswept village would be easy in comparison with his experiences in the mine. But now he experienced a different kind of pain: loneliness and isolation. As he sat through the endless winter months of near darkness and howling winds, thinking of his lost life, the wife and children he would never see again, his hut so cold that his hair was frozen to his thin pallet in the morning, he knew he had to change his fate. If not, he would die alone and in bitterness.

For a man like Aleksandr, the only way to survive in Siberia would be to find something productive to do. And he needed a woman to keep him warm at night.

The village came to life in the short but warm summer. Aleksandr approached everyone he encountered, asking for work. Most of the villagers knew that well-educated exiles weren’t particularly useful with their hands, and were reticent to hire a revolutionist. But one of them took a chance on Aleksandr Danilovich. Temujin, a cooper, taught Aleksandr to cut and plane barrel staves in exchange for food and a better hut than the one he had been given. Temujin had eyed Aleksandr’s size and imagined him with some weight on his frame; he was impressed by his dignified manner and tireless work ethic. He didn’t care that Aleksandr had been exiled for being a revolutionary. Temujin was a Buryat, a widower who had come from Verkhneudinsk, also known as Upper Vdinsk, a town on the east side of Lake Baikal. Aleksandr liked the smell of the wood shavings and the comforting rhythm of the adze over the strips of timber. Temujin accepted Aleksandr as an honest, hard-working man. In this way, he gave him hope.

After a few months another Decembrist arrived in Chita—someone of his class who had fought the same fight for the same cause—and his friendship brought a quiet relief to Aleksandr. As a few more exiles slowly filtered into Chita, they created their own small social milieu.

Two of his fellow revolutionaries were fortunate enough to still be married. Their wives had made the endless, desperate journey, losing everything to remain with their husbands. Watching the couples, Aleksandr refused to give in to self-pity, but felt an even keener need for his own companionship. There were a few single or widowed Russian women in Chita, but they were of peasant stock. Aleksandr couldn’t envision himself marrying anyone but a Russian woman of high standing, as his wife had been.

At first, he hadn’t paid much attention to Temujin’s daughter, Ula, when she brought her father his noon meal. While he didn’t initially find her Mongolian features attractive—the dark, almond-shaped eyes, small, neat nose and lips, and glossy black hair that she clipped at the back of her neck and left hanging to her waist—eventually he became used to her face and shy smile. He also appreciated her demure, respectful nature. She spoke Buryat to her father but addressed the ex-colonel in a formal, lightly accented Russian, which, as he grew more interested, took on a pleasant rhythm.

Ula had been betrothed to a young Buryat who had succumbed to a fever the year Aleksandr arrived in Chita. She found the army man dignified and proper, qualities she had never witnessed among the Russian peasants in Chita. There was something in the direct way he looked at her, studying her respectfully and yet openly—unlike the more modest Buryat men—that both flustered and excited her.

Ula’s father wanted to see his daughter married and happy. Aleksandr, at thirty-five, was fifteen years older than Ula, but that wasn’t a concern. Temujin worried more about the difference in their culture and religion. Aleksandr attended Mass daily at the small Orthodox church he and his old Decembrist companions had helped to build.

When Aleksandr officially asked Temujin if he would allow him to marry Ula, the father brought up his concern over religion. Aleksandr told him firmly that he had no difficulty in allowing Ula to retain her Buddhism. Should there be children, they could be raised in both faiths.

And so Aleksandr and Ula were married. Aleksandr taught his new wife to write her name in Russian, and read to her at night. He listened to stories of her childhood and learned about Buddhism. Though they had so little in common, Aleksandr was grateful that he had found a quiet, undemanding woman with whom to live out his life, and he experienced true joy when Timofey Aleksandrovitch was born a year after their marriage. It appeared he would be their only child, but seven years later they were surprised and pleased by the birth of Nikolai Aleksandrovitch.

By the time little Tima was old enough to spin a prayer wheel and chant with his mother at the
datsan
—the Buryat Buddhist temple—as well as say his prayers to the icons and cross himself from right to left in the Orthodox way, as his father had taught him, Aleksandr had helped Temujin expand the business. Although originally the new couple had lived with Temujin in the traditional peasant izba, Aleksandr was soon able to build his own cottage. He built it in the style of the small country dachas he had enjoyed over hot summers as a child, and he painted its wooden shutters blue.

In spite of knowing he would never again walk the streets of a thriving, exciting city, never again ride a tall military horse, never again mingle with St. Petersburg or Moscow’s social elite, and never again effect any change in Russia’s politics, Aleksandr Kasakov nonetheless found a strange happiness.

He had lost the energy to fight for anything. He was finished with conflict.

When he made the sign of the cross over his sleeping sons or held his wife in the dark of the night, his face in her thick, fragrant hair, he felt he had been given a new life. His wife and two daughters in St. Petersburg could not be replaced, but with Ula and his sons he could let go of the pain.

Timofey inherited his mother’s eyes and high cheekbones, but from his father he possessed fair skin and the soft waves in his black hair. His younger brother Nikolai—Kolya—had the fair hair and deep blue eyes of their father. He was also built more delicately than his brother.

Aleksandr made sure his sons knew how to read and write in both Russian and French. He also discussed the political situation in Russia in simple terms with Tima as soon as he thought the boy could understand; he talked openly about his past life in the army, his role in the uprising and the reason for his exile. He stressed the idea of freedom, and how he had fought for this for the peasants who made up over eighty percent of Russia’s population. “To live freely, to own your own land—and your own soul—is what is important to a man,” he told his son. “In other places in the world there is freedom for all. Remember that, and don’t
ever find yourself in the possession of another man. To be free is a God-given right.”

Tima was not always a willing audience, but he eagerly devoured the books his father owned. And soon Aleksandr had borrowed all of his friends’ books to feed the passion of his older son. Kolya, on the other hand, wasn’t as interested in reading, or learning sums, or hearing his father’s recitations about their country. He preferred to spend time sitting quietly in front of the fire or the stove, his head tilted slightly as if he was listening to something no one else could hear. As a very small child he hummed and made simple melodies with little Tibetan chimes and blocks of wood. From a young age, he loved going to worship with both his parents, growing rigid with concentration when the Orthodox priest chanted rhythmically or when the Tibetan monks hit their gongs and rang their bells. He would always stop what he was doing when the Russian church bells rang, both morning and evening, nodding his head with the beat.

Ula protected Kolya in all ways, neither pushing him nor having many expectations of him, as she did of Tima. Aleksandr felt she babied the child, and in his heart wished his second son were more like Tima, so interested in the world around him, so candid and inquisitive.

Temujin owned an ancient squeezebox, and occasionally played it for his grandsons. When Kolya was four, he took it from his grandfather’s hands and pushed and pulled it with a strange attentiveness, placing his little fingers on the buttons. Within a week he had taught himself to play, creating music that none of them had heard before. They were not the Buryat melodies his mother sang to him, nor the lively military or Russian folk tunes his father whistled. None of them
understood how he knew how to do this, but Aleksandr at last concluded that Kolya was a natural musician. With hard-earned kopecks, he paid an elderly exile who played the violin with aching sweetness to teach his son. The old man had a finely made small violin and taught the young Kolya on this instrument.

Oh, the boy can most certainly play, the old music teacher told Aleksandr after three lessons. Within a year the teacher reported that it was pointless for Aleksandr to spend any more money on the tutoring.
I can’t teach the boy anything more
, the old man said.
He so quickly learned to read music. And once he has listened to a tune, he can play it perfectly. He makes up his own melodies, and can harmonize with me to anything I play
. The music teacher went on to say that he had rarely witnessed such early talent.

Aleksandr bought the small violin from the old man, and handed it to Kolya. The boy played for hours every day, showing little interest in anything else. He told his family that when he played, the world turned a beautiful colour—gold, the colour of the leaves in the fall when the sun shone through them.

As Kolya learned the language of his violin, Timofey grew tall and strong, and spent much time competing in games of strength with the other boys in Chita. It was clear to his parents that he had the qualities of a leader, and they observed how the others regarded him with respect and a certain caution, always deferring to him.

Kolya, on the other hand, was sensitive and physically slight. His mother was glad that he would rather stay inside
with her and play his little violin than be outside in the cold wind. And besides, Kolya’s long, curly hair and wide eyes and delicate features made him a target for the other boys, and he was taunted when he went out into the muddy road that ran down the middle of the village.