The Lost Souls of Angelkov (7 page)

It was June, and along the rough, muddy trail to Irkutsk, Tima encountered thunderstorms that rolled across the steppes with terrifying power, and midges that drove him nearly mad
as he slept under the stars, rolled in his blankets. Walking, stumbling, fighting to keep his footing, he led Felya through quagmires and rushing streams. When he ran out of food, he bought what he needed from the hamlets he rode through.

One afternoon, two ragged men accosted him as he stopped to let Felya drink at a narrow river, grabbing at his saddlebags. He escaped them easily, but felt threatened for the first time in his life. At the next village he bought a long-handled knife. Every day he was thankful for his Don horse. Felya was agile, with the immense endurance of the Russian horses bred for harsh climates and conditions.

When he finally arrived at Irkutsk, two weeks after leaving Chita, he stood on one of its main streets and looked around him in wonder.

He planned to spend only one night there, buying more food and then riding on. He had to take advantage of the weather. He wasn’t sure how far he would get before Siberia’s early autumn descended, but once it did, he would have to stop and find work. He could easily die travelling in the winter months through the isolated steppes and wooded taiga of Siberia as he attempted to cross the low Urals leading to European Russia.

Irkutsk tempted Tima with sights and sounds he had never dreamed of in tiny Chita, but he knew he couldn’t stay. He needed to get as far west as he could, as quickly as possible. Nikolai—Kolya—was somewhere in Irkutsk. He couldn’t take a chance on his brother seeing him.

He pushed away thoughts of Kolya for this one night in the exciting city. He spent some of his carefully hoarded kopecks to board Felya. He bought cabbage soup and a dish of marrow and peas and drank four bottles of cheap, sour
beer. He was walking, slightly unsteadily, back to the stable, thinking he’d spend the night in the straw with Felya if no one threw him out, wondering if Felya had been given the oats he’d paid for or if he’d been cheated and the horse was munching low-grade hay.

A young woman in a doorway beckoned to him.

Heady from the beer, flushed with the exhilaration of the wooden streets with their oil lamps and bright storefronts, Timofey went to her. He allowed her to take his hand and lead him through the doorway and into a room partitioned with hanging blankets. Timofey tried to ignore the moans and whispers in the hot, stinking room.

“What’s your name then,
moy sladki
? Eh, sweetheart?”

“Grigori,” he said after a moment. “Grigori Sergeyevich Naryshkin.” He combined the names of three of his father’s old friends. He did not want to be Timofey Aleksandrovitch Kasakov anymore. Although he knew there was almost no chance of anyone recognizing his father’s name, he wanted a new start. He no longer wanted to be thought of—even by himself—as the son of a revolutionist and the brother of the sweet, trusting boy he’d betrayed.

“Ah, Grishenka, my beauty,” the girl said. “Haven’t you got some eyes, eh? All the girls must love those eyes.”

“How much?” he asked, trying to keep his breathing even. He was a virgin but didn’t want this girl to know.

She named a price and he nodded, handing her the money. She tucked his kopecks under the thin mattress, giving a little laugh before shrugging out of her frock and pulling Timofey on top of her as she lay in her patched chemise.

Her hair was an odd red colour and Timofey liked the sound of her laugh. He could see her nipples, small and as
pink as her cheeks, through her chemise. Such was his inexperience and excitement that he climaxed almost as soon as he’d released himself from his trousers and pressed against her. She cried out in annoyance, pushing him aside and fussing at him for soiling her chemise. Then she sat up and gave a brittle laugh.

“First time?” she said, and Timofey drew back at the stink of raw onion on her breath, noticing the silvery streaks stretched down the slight sag of her belly.

He stood awkwardly beside the bed, humiliated and angry, hating her laugh.

She rubbed at her chemise with a foul-smelling rag, and then tossed it to him. “Here, clean yourself up. You paid for an hour. I’m tired. I’ll sleep for the rest of it.” With that, she settled onto her side facing him. Within moments she was emitting small puffing sounds from half-open lips.

Timofey watched her sleep. He wanted to smack her for laughing at him. Instead, he listened to the stifled, rhythmic groans behind the blanket separating them from the next pallet, hearing the damp slap of flesh on flesh. After a few minutes of listening, he ran his rough fingers over the woman’s thinly covered nipple, and then climbed on top of her, pushing up her chemise again. She made an irritated sound as she squinted at him in the dim light.

He shoved himself into her, not stopping as she said,
Wait … let me just … my hair is caught
 …

“I’m sorry,” Timofey murmured as he forced himself not to focus on the warm, welcoming softness of her.

He did not let himself think of the road back to Chita, or the one that lay ahead. He did not let himself think of his brother Kolya.

He especially tried not to think of the woman under him. This time he moved in an unhurried fashion, determined not to embarrass himself again.

“Well, you figured it out that time,” she said when he’d finished and was sitting on the edge of the bed. “Just keep at it, and smile that pretty smile of yours. Will you come back to visit me,
moy sladki
?” She reached up to draw her index finger down his cheek, but Timofey recoiled from her touch. He stood, pulling up his trousers and stepping into his boots.

He discovered there were women to be had for next to nothing in every little village and hamlet along the way. Some of them sensed something—they weren’t sure if it was suppressed violence or simply indifference—and were wary. Some of them were attracted to his guarded silence and dark looks. On his lonely journey, he wanted the comfort of a woman in the dark. But never did he allow himself to be moved by any of them.

He decided to stop in Krasnoyarsk, northwest of Irkutsk, for the winter. He got a job unloading timber. It felt good to use his muscles again after so much time astride Felya.

From Krasnoyarsk, he wrote two letters and sent them both to his dead father’s friend. The man was a Decembrist who had been with his father in the uprising in St. Petersburg in 1825. One of them was for Timofey’s mother, who couldn’t read. In it he told his mother that he had not been able to find Kolya in Irkustsk, and that he was not coming home to Chita. He told her that the friend would explain about the money from the sale of the cooperage, the family business where Timofey had worked alongside his father until his death.
It had been a thriving concern, making barrels for Chita and the environs. The money would be enough to last her as long as she lived.
I embrace you and bless you. Tima
, he ended it.

The second letter asked the friend to sell the cooperage and give the money to his mother. He also asked him to look out for his mother should she need help.
I will not be returning to Chita. My life is elsewhere
, he wrote, signing it
Timofey Aleksandrovitch Kasakov
, knowing it would be the last time he used this name.

Over that winter, sharing a drafty hut with ten snoring, coughing, flatulent men, he heard stories about their lives as prisoners in distant
katorgas
, working to cut timber or, like his father, in the mines. From those who were released or those who had escaped, he understood, for the first time, that Siberia was its own prison, and grew anxious for the spring.

He left on the day the last crusty mounds of snow were melting in the shadows beneath the spruce trees, setting off for the next major town, Novosibirsk.

As he travelled the slick, muddy spring roads, Timofey—Grisha now—fought not to think of Kolya. Most days he didn’t, but occasionally he’d see a thin, fair-haired boy and his heart would give one painful thump. Once he passed a man trudging down a narrow road, merrily playing a tune on a rough wooden
svirel
—a peasant flute—and this also caused a dark pain.

If he spent the night in a village hovel and could not avoid thinking about his little brother and how he’d betrayed him, he would take out the little flute with
Tima
—his own former name—carved clumsily onto its side. Kolya had made it for
him as a gift. He couldn’t play it, but his brother could. Then he would drink a bottle of cheap vodka so he could sleep without the familiar nightmare. If he was on the road when he thought too much of Kolya, he’d whip Felya to a gallop, fleeing from his thoughts.

He was a week east of Novosibirsk when he was surrounded on the road by a crew of rough-looking men in grey tunics. They questioned him and asked for papers.

Papers? What papers?

Papers that showed he owned the horse, they told him. You don’t look like the kind of young man who could afford such a horse as the well-fed Don. You’ve stolen it, they told him, and pulled him off. He fought them, but all it earned him was two broken fingers and a ringing in one ear that lasted ten days. They threw him into the back of a cart with three other men. The men in the cart said nothing as he was chained in beside them. But as they jolted and bumped through the night and most of the next day, the man beside him told how a nearby work camp had suffered a loss of men from dysentery. The low government officials who had broken his fingers and temporarily partially deafened him were arresting any able-bodied men they could find on the road that day in order to meet the required quota of cut timber.

Grisha cursed his bad luck. At first he was most angry over the loss of Felya, hoping whoever owned him next wouldn’t mistreat him. He didn’t imagine the false arrest would come to anything more than a week or two of hard work, and then he would be on his way again, although this time on foot. He was used to hard work. But when he arrived at the camp
deep in the forest of conifers, and saw the haunted expressions on the sallow, lined faces of the other men, and the chains securing them to their wheelbarrows and saws, he felt a deep thump of dread.

As the first weeks passed, all he could think of was his father. His father, at the time not as young and strong as Grisha, had survived in worse conditions for over a year, farther north, in the mines. At least Grisha was outside, breathing clean air. In the thick taiga of summer the men found berries and occasionally wild mushrooms to supplement the meagre rations they were given after twelve hours of cutting trees. He was allowed to keep what he brought with him, apart from his knife. In his sack Grisha still had a few of his books, the crucifix and the prayer wheel, and the
svirel
from Kolya.

During the following winter, Grisha watched men all around him die from overwork, cold, malnutrition and illness. All night, every night, men coughed and moaned and prayed, but Grisha refused to pray. When his partner on the crosscut saw, his fingers numb from the cold, lost his grip for only a moment, the sharp, angled teeth bit deeply into his thigh. Grisha watched, helpless, as the man bled to death in the snow, and knew he no longer believed.