The Ninth Buddha (50 page)

“We went up close.
 
It was freezing, I remember; everything was frost, bleak white frost that lay hard on the metal of the trains, turning them white.
 
They were full of bodies, the bodies of all the passengers who’d frozen to death there, afraid to leave the security of their compartments, not knowing what had happened, waiting for help to be sent out from Moscow.
 
They told me that forty-five thousand people froze to death in those carriages.
 
I don’t know if that’s true.
 
But I saw a lot of bodies.
 
All preserved, all beautifully preserved.”

He stammered.

“I ... I saw a beautiful woman in one carriage, dressed in sable, with frost clinging to her hair like lace.
 
She hadn’t changed, not really.
 
She’d grown pale as ice and stiff with frost, but her features were still perfect.
 
Beautiful she’d become a sort of doll, white and sad and untouchable, like Pierrot in a mask.
 
I wanted to break a window and go inside to look at her more closely.
 
I wanted to kiss her, just to taste the ice on her lips.
 
I thought I could thaw her, I thought my warmth could bring her back to life.
 
She was so still, so very still.”

He grew silent, lost in the pain of memory, walking alongside the frozen tracks of the Trans-Siberian Express, watching pale faces in the gathering dusk, and wooden cattle-trucks crammed with the dead.

Christopher left him like that, brooding, and returned to the room upstairs.
 
It would soon be time to leave.
 
He had no choice.

He had never had a choice.

Mongolia

They left later that morning.
 
Chodron stayed in Sining-fu with the family who ran the rest-house in which they had lodged: the nemo had taken a fancy to her and, on hearing her story, expressed a wish to take her in.
 
For her part, the child had been overjoyed: the excitement of Sining-fu, the first town of any size she had ever seen, and the luxury of living in a house instead of a tent were, for the moment, compensations of a sort for the losses she had sustained.
 
She readily agreed to stay, and neither Chindamani nor Christopher could recommend a better solution.

But Chindamani had found it hard to part from the little girl.

Apart from her old nurse Sonam, she had never known female companionship; and Chodron’s loneliness had reminded her acutely of her own as a child.
 
Perhaps the laws dictating that a child be taken from its parents at an early age merely to live out another phase in the cycle of incarnation were in their way as brutal as the violence that had made Chodron an orphan.

The car was a sturdy little Fiat which Winterpole had obtained at a price from the Dao T’ai.
 
It had been modified for the desert and used up until then by the Dao T’ai for brief hunting expeditions into the Gobi.
 
There were enough cans of petrol for a journey to Siberia and back, water, food, and tents.
 
Winterpole was to drive while Christopher navigated with the help of charts that came courtesy of the British Embassy in Peking.

They skirted the eastern fringes of the Nan Shan mountains, travelling north from Sining-fu, then veering slightly east.
 
Late that afternoon they passed through the Great Wall near Wuwei.

Here, the Wall was little more than a symbol: low mud ramparts, broken and eroded by man and time alike.
 
But for all the insignificance of mud and cracked stone, Christopher felt they had passed more than a token barrier.

Once, they passed a long train of astonished camels For a moment, the air held a smell of spices, then they were past and the desert was all about them again.
 
Ahead of them, the Ala Shan stretched out into a blue haze on the horizon.
 
Beyond it, the Gobi proper shifted beneath a shimmering sun.
 
Inside the car, it was unbearably hot.

“You were telling me about Dauria,” Christopher reminded Winterpole.

“About Ungern Sternberg and Dauria.”
 
He was sitting in the rear with Chindamani, who had taken much coaxing to ride in the machine.
 
She was still torn between terror and wonder at the speed with which the motor car travelled.

Winterpole glanced up, like a man suddenly woken from a deep sleep.

“Dauria?
 
Why yes, of course.
 
Dauria.”
 
He looked out of the window, at the desert rushing past, at the sand piling up on all sides, pale and sterile.

“I want you to understand what it was like, Christopher.
 
I want you to know what you’ll be going into.
 
Believe me, if I thought we had any choice, I’d see Ungern in hell before I made a deal with him.
 
But it’s him or Zamyatin now.”

He paused.
 
Something was making him reluctant to say more about what he had seen.

“I went there afterwards,” he said.

“After I’d seen Semenov, I went to visit von Ungern Sternberg in Dauria.
 
Semenov suggested it himself; he thought I might be impressed.
 
I don’t know what he expected really.
 
They didn’t understand us. Still don’t.

“I arrived late one afternoon, just as the sun was setting.
 
We came down into a vast plain through a narrow circle of sandy hills.
 
The plain was devoid of life as far as we could see.
 
Nothing grew, nothing moved there was just a collection of dirty huts, like a leper colony in the middle of nowhere.
 
I’ve never felt so great a loss of the sense of place, of definition, boundaries.
 
It was as though we were nowhere at all, as if we were at the centre of a great emptiness.

“There was a little Russian church with a spire, more in the western than the Byzantine style.
 
It might have been quite pretty once, I don’t know; but it had lost all its tiles and paint .. . and something else.
 
Whatever it is that makes a church a church how can I explain?
 
And down in the middle of the plain was Ungern’s headquarters.
 
A small fortress built from red bricks.
 
From where I first saw it, it looked very much like a slaughterhouse a slaughterhouse someone had daubed all over with blood.
 
And there was wind blowing through it all, an empty sort of wind.”

He paused briefly, seeing the red walls of Dauria again, hearing the empty wind whistle across the plain.
 
Outside the car, the sands of the desert swayed past, faded, hazy, a waterless mirage shimmering in the late afternoon light.

“That was where I first met Ungern.
 
I won’t forget it.
 
The way he looked at me when I walked in ... The way he waited for me.”

He shuddered.

“Ordinarily, I’d hit a man who looked at me like that.
 
But I didn’t hit him.
 
I knew better than that.
 
I tried to stare him out, but .. .
 
Anyway, you’ll meet him soon enough.
 
Be very careful when you do.
 
He can shift from complete affability to the purest sadism or rage in a matter of seconds.
 
I saw it myself.

“He always carries a sort of riding crop made of bamboo.

Extremely thin and flexible, but with rough edges.
 
One of his staff officers came in.
 
A youngish man, probably not long out of military academy, but already showing marked signs of the dissipation I’d already seen in Chita.
 
He reported something Ungern obviously didn’t like to hear.
 
The baron flew into a rage and hit him full across the face with the cane.
 
It cut the man’s cheek open, right along the bone.
 
He almost fainted, but Ungern made him stand and finish his report. He was quivering with rage Ungern, I mean.
 
But the second the boy left, he began talking to me as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.
 
From what I know now, I suppose nothing had.”

Winterpole looked out of the window to his left.
 
In the west, the sun was setting, blood-red in a haze of sand.
 
Behind them, the dust laid a long plume across the desert.

“Something else happened while I was there,” he went on.

“They brought in an old man, a Jew.
 
His son had been executed on Ungern’s orders the day before, for no reason I was able to ascertain.

The old man had come to ask for the body.
 
That’s all.
 
He wanted to give his son a Jewish burial, not leave him to be eaten by the dogs the way they do in those parts.
 
He made no complaint.
 
He didn’t criticize.
 
But whether it was his face or his manner or his being Jewish or something else, he infuriated the baron.

“Ungern called two of his aides and had them take the old man outside.
 
He told me to come out and watch, to see how he punished traitors.
 
I saw I would have to obey: being a foreigner was no guarantee of immunity there.

“They took the old man and put him in a tall wooden box.
 
There was a hole in the side of it, and they had the old man put his arm through it.
 
It was freezing, well below zero: we were all dressed in warm furs, but it still felt cold, bitterly cold.

“They tied the old man’s arm so he couldn’t get it back inside the box.
 
Then they poured water over it until it was soaking.
 
It didn’t take long to freeze.
 
Three hours later, they came back.
 
The arm had frozen solid, like a lump of ice.
 
Ungern just walked up and snapped it off. I watched him do it.
 
As if he were snapping off a rotten twig.
 
It made a cracking sound, like an old branch.
 
It didn’t even bleed.”

He paused.
 
It was growing dark suddenly.
 
He switched on the headlights of the car, long white cones that stabbed into the darkness far ahead, catching insects in their beams, creating narrow worlds in which small creatures stirred for brief moments before being swept away again into the blackness.

“The old man died, of course.
 
He died that night in great pain, and by morning the dogs had eaten what was left of him, along with his son.”

Winterpole looked up.
 
All the aplomb, all the casual affectation had drained away to leave him empty and bereft, like a shell far away from the heart of the sea.

“So now you know,” he said.

“Now you know who we’re dealing with.
 
Who our friends are.”
 
His eyes filled with a sense of horror.

“He’s all we have here, Christopher.
 
He’s all that stands between us and the Bolsheviks.”

There was silence.
 
The car drove on through the dark waste, a brightly lit warning of times yet to come.
 
The desert was coming awake. Between them, Winterpole and Ungern Sternberg and Zamyatin would bring the benefits of their cold civilization into the wilderness.
 
If it did not blossom, they would not despair: they had time: they would water it with blood.

“Do we need friends like that?”
 
asked Christopher.
 
He failed to see the necessity.
 
He failed to understand how such a frail barrier could stand between two philosophies.

“It’s hard for you to understand, Christopher.
 
You weren’t in Europe during the war.
 
You didn’t see what we did to one another.

We lost our heads.
 
We became animals.
 
When the war ended, it was the general opinion that the beastliness had ended with it.
 
As if that could ever be.

“The war to end wars” that’s what we called it.
 
But how can war end?

It’s part of us, it’s in our blood.

“If the Bolsheviks spread their creed any further, there’ll be another war, one worse than the last.
 
My job is to prevent that, at any cost.
 
Our people back home have just won a war, and peace has never seemed so good to them.
 
They want it to go on forever:

poppies in the fields, photographs of Uncle Arthur wearing his medals on the mantelpiece, the flag unfurling day after day in a stiff breeze, the home fires burning all winter long.
 
And I’m afraid for them.
 
They’re about to be overtaken by Zamyatin and History, and they don’t even know it.
 
That’s why Ungern Sternberg is necessary.
 
Regrettable, but necessary, I assure you.”

He cleared his throat.

“He won’t last long, don’t worry.
 
Men like him serve a purpose in times like these.
 
He cleared the Chinese out of the way and did a good job of it.
 
There would have been an incident if we’d done the same Diplomatic rows.
 
Reparations.

“He’ll hold off the Bolsheviks until we can organize something better, something more permanent.
 
Then we’ll put our own man on the throne in his place.
 
The Tibetan boy, perhaps.
 
We’ll supply arms and advisers, monetary reserves.
 
We’ll put up telegraphs and open banks and start trade flowing.
 
It’ll all work out in the end you’ll see.
 
Believe me, people in very high places have discussed this thing.
 
Very high places indeed.
 
Discussed it inside and out.