The Exile

2. Arrival in Orenburg-2

Then the barber took an open razor.

“Give it to me! I’ll shave myself,” Shevchenko said, reaching for the razor.

“That’s against the rules!” the barber said sternly. “We’ve got such rakes around this place that if you give one of them a razor — s***h! — he’ll cut somebody’s throat, yours or his own. A penal battalion is a penal battalion.”

A chill crept involuntarily down the poet’s spine. That’s where he was ordered to be sent away by the obtuse and cruel Holsteinian, the “powerful Orthodox Czar of the State,” as the recently approved national anthem, “God Save the Czar,” went. Throughout the entire Christ-loving Rus­sian army, German rods, drill, fist law, and stupid disci­pline held sway, but here, in these line battalions, it was carried to the point of being absurd.

“Don’t be afraid; I won’t cut you,” the barber said, hon­ing the razor rhythmically against a strop. “Every day I shave not only soldiers but the officers and the general himself,” he continued, interpreting in his own way the shade of alarm that had passed across the lively face of the new arrival.

“Leave my side whiskers at least,” Shevchenko asked.

“That’s against the rules,” the barber retorted categori­cally and snipped away at the remainder of the beard and the whiskers which Shevchenko had grown when he re­ceived the letter of enfranchisement and enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts.

“But soldiers are permitted to have a mustache, and in the cavalry it is even a must. This gives them a dashing look,” the barber said, lathering Shevchenko’s cheek. “Want me to leave you a mustache? You khokhol chaps always wear mustaches.”

“All right, leave it then,” Shevchenko said with a sudden smile. “I’ll have a mustache like a Zaporozhian Cossack.”

The barber loved his trade and fussed around the poet for a long time, trimming and clipping his hair here and there. At last, satisfied with his work, he clicked his tongue with satisfaction:

“Everything’s ship-shape! You are a picture of a lady’s man!”

The barber produced a cheap little mirror from behind the cuff of his uniform and handed it to Shevchenko.

The last time he looked at himself in a mirror was on the fifth of May at a coaching inn at Brovary near Kiev, when he wore a tailcoat and had a nosegay of orange blossoms pinned to a lapel as the best man at Professor Kostomarov’s wedding. Just over two months had passed since then — only sixty-five days, but looking out of the mirror now was a strange old man in whose eyes was such deep sorrow that it made Shevchenko shrink back involun­tarily.

He had grown ten years older within these two months: deep wrinkles of sorrow creased his face from the nose to the corners of his lips. Without the groomed whiskers he was accustomed to, his immature mustache stuck clumsily over the drooping corners of his mouth like the bristling brush of a walrus. The curly dark-copper tuft on his crown was gone as well, and the close-cropped hair lay flat, mak­ing his bulging forehead look all the more disproportion­ately large.

“Just like a fine lady’s man,” the barber repeated, waiting to be complimented on his work.

I’m more of a horror, Shevchenko wanted to say, but remained silent and gave the barber a ruble.

Overjoyed to have been given an unexpected tip, the bar­ber shot a surprised look at what he took for a peculiar customer, snapped smartly to attention, and shot out like he would have done in front of an appreciative general:

“Thank you very much indeed! I’ll have a nip to your health.”

In the barracks, Shevchenko lay down on his bunk, op­pressed and shocked by the striking change in his appear­ance. But it was not the lack of his luxuriant hair and smart side whiskers that distressed him: in the cheap mirror he had seen the reflection of his inner torment, and realized that he could not hide it behind a sham front of contempt or indifference.

He bit into his lip and turned away to the wall, but several minutes later he sat up and brought his fist down on the bunk.

“Enough! I’ll have to learn to keep in check not only my nerves. I’ll have to learn to control my facial expres­sion and fashion myself a mask lest my eyes, lips or the line of the eyebrows betray my inner pain. And I’ll make it a purpose. Yes, I will, whatever it may take me!”

That moment a man of about thirty with shining pitch-black eyes and a mop of curly disheveled hair of the same color came up with a peculiarly swaggering gait.

“May I introduce myself?” he said. “Kozlovsky, Andrei Kozlovsky! A nobleman.”

“Shevchenko,” the poet replied dryly with a slight bow, but did not extend his hand.

Kozlovsky did not bat an eyelid at such a greeting, and sat down at Shevchenko’s side without any invitation.

“Mon cher, we’ve landed at the end of the world, as it were. Why did they pack you off here, if it’s no secret?”

Kozlovsky’s manners and free and easy tone irritated and jarred upon Shevchenko, and so he answered evasively:

“Well, you know how it happens. I wrote something, and some people didn’t exactly like it.”

“A promissory note, I suppose?” Kozlovsky understood it in his own way and seemed to be glad. “I autographed a couple of them myself. Papa and me, we’ve got similar handwriting; you might even say it’s identical. Both of us are Kozlovsky, and both Andrei. Well, when the time came to pay my debt, my devil of an old man got wildly mad. ‘I’ve earned all that by working my fingers to the bone,’ he said, ‘and you think you’re just going to gamble it away?’ Well, my mama saved me a couple of times, but then he went and put me away. The damned old gizzard! He’ll croak one day, and you can be sure he won’t take his filthy lucre down into his grave. But I’ll pay him back yet!” He flashed his eyes angrily. “I’ll settle accounts with him one of these days!”

“Please, excuse me,” Shevchenko interrupted him. “All this is very sad, even tragic, I would say, but I haven’t had a wink of sleep for eight days. My whole body aches from the jolting. I want to rest. Let’s have a talk another time.”

“I understand! Comprene and pardon,” Kozlovsky said, jumping to his feet. “I’ll be going! But… could I have quelque chose on credit… Well, at least for a quarter of a bottle of vodka or for a nip.”

His brazen face abruptly took on a humble and cringingly pathetic look like that of a hungry dog at the sight of food.

Shevchenko searched in his pockets and gave him some coppers.

“Thank you ever so much!” Kozlovsky said. “Have a good rest!”

He made for the door with the same peculiarly swagger­ing gait, while Shevchenko stretched himself out on the bunk as before, but sleep would not come to him. Snatches of thoughts revolved in his mind in a restless swarm. The future rose before him in a black impenetrable curtain, while everything surrounding him seemed like a cesspool in which his life would have to ebb away. He got up, went to a water keg, drank of the water, and asked the orderly, making besoms of saltwort, to give him something to read.

“We’re permitted to read only divine books,” the orderly answered after a thought. “Only those who belong to the Old Believers really care for such reading, but the nobility aren’t interested much!”

“Give me something divine then,” Shevchenko said with a smile. “An intelligent person can find a lot of interesting things in the divine writings as well.”

The orderly took a thick Bible in a half-torn binding down from a shelf, blew a cloud of dust off it by the door, and gave it to Shevchenko.

“But mind you don’t tear any pages out of it for rolling cigarettes,” he added, and went back to his work.

On approaching the man lying on the bunk, Lazarevsky stopped in indecision. His excitement made him suddenly forget the name of the poet and all the words expressing rapture, love and idolization he wanted to tell him.

“Excuse me, are you Shevchenko, our Bard?” he asked in a stutter.

Shevchenko leisurely put the Bible aside, looked Laza­revsky over with distrustful and rather unfriendly eyes, and sat up unhurriedly. What did this young civil servant want of him? After everything he had gone through since his arrest, he suspected every official to be either a spy or provocateur the gendarmes used to plant in the prison cells of the Third Department. At best it might be simply a provincial philistine, for whom the appearance of an exiled “versifier” would be, if not a sensation, in any case interesting news which could be broadcast to the Orenburg ladies and matrons whom it was easy to “take in” on what was presented as a big secret.

“What can I do for you?” Shevchenko asked so coldly that any other visitor would have instantly lost every desire to continue the conversation.

But Lazarevsky did not notice anything. He only knew that this was Shevchenko, the marvelous magician of the word who for the first time had made the Ukrainian lan­guage sound with the same force and beauty as the Russian under the magic pen of Pushkin and Lermontov or the German in the fiery verse of Friedrich Schiller.

“My God! Where can I find the words to express what joy, what wonderful moments I experienced reading your Kobzar,” he said. “Serhiy Levitsky and I have been reading and rereading it the whole winter through! We’ve learned almost all of it by heart. After we subscribed to The Haidamaks we counted the days when the book would arrive at last. We could have hardly dreamed to meet you! Why, it is such a … such a –”

He stopped abruptly, realizing that he could not call this soul-trying meeting either joyous or happy and, carried away by his reverence and sympathy, he enclosed Shevchenko in an embrace.

Shevchenko freed himself with a light shrug of the shoulder, and without looking at Lazarevsky, answered dryly as before:

“Thank you for your appreciation of my work. I am glad you have enjoyed it.”

“Enjoy just isn’t the word. I was happy. We’re missing our homeland terribly, for we are countrymen after all — from Chernihiv Province, and were assigned to this place after graduating from the university. We’re in our third year of service here, and it’s boring.” The young man sighed so sincerely that for the first time Shevchenko looked at him attentively with an inquiring, although still distrustful look in his eyes.

Lazarevsky sat on the outermost edge of the bunk and looked at his favorite poet like a schoolgirl would have regarded a famous actor after a breathtaking stage perform­ance. At the same time there was such a painful sadness in his look, and Shevchenko felt awkward for his distrust and reserve. But the bitter experience of the past two months had opened to him a facet of life which made him unwontedly cautious.

Lazarevsky wanted to tell him everything that was on his mind and to hear at once everything from the poet he adored. But he felt uneasy about asking him, lest he touch the fresh wound in the poet’s soul. He faltered in embar­rassment, not venturing to raise the most horrible, albeit most important question: Who had dared do such a thing to the poet, and why? Shevchenko had not been simply banished to this place like some of the other political pris­oners, but conscripted by arbitrary force into twenty-five-year service as a private in a line battalion of the Orenburg Military Border District adjoining a wild steppe, where the ungovernable tribes of Kokand and Khiva frequently at­tacked the improvised forts and border posts.