The Golden Sabre

Ten minutes along the road they came into a large village. There was a main street and side streets running off it; a white stone church sat on the slope above the wooden houses, its golden dome dull and patchy. Children and dogs appeared from nowhere; then doors opened and men and women stood there. Excitement made the warm lazy air come alive; no one had ever seen such a magnificent car. Cabell and the others floated down the main street as Cleopatra’s barge might have floated down the Nile.

The main street ran into a square halfway through the village. On one side of the square a row of walnut trees fronted the entrance to a small railway station. Old men sat on benches beneath the trees, sometimes poking with their walking sticks at the hens that scratched about in the dust; they sat in silence, gossip and comment exhausted. Half a dozen women stood waiting their turn at the well-pump in the centre of the square, chatter spouting with the water. Several dogs rose up out of their torpor and began to bark as the Rolls-Royce and its procession came into the square and pulled up.

‘You do the shopping, Miss Penfold.’ Cabell got down from the car, smiling broadly at the gathering crowd like a politician gathering votes. ‘Take the kids and Nikolai with you, get a good supply. Don’t waste time. I’ll have a talk with these old guys, find out what lies south of here.’

The old men sat up straight on their benches as he approached them. They looked remarkably similar in their loose blouses and baggy trousers, as if they had all shrunk to a uniform size inside their clothes. Their only difference was in their headgear: some wore caps, one or two had straw hats. They peered at him with their rheumy eyes, recognizing him as a foreigner but knowing no maps on which to place him. Their eyes retreated into the gullies of their faces and he felt he was walking into an ambush. He was aware that the crowd, those that hadn’t followed Eden and the others, had fallen silent. He had a sudden premonition that he should turn back, get into the car, pick up the others and drive on. But it was too late now.

‘Good morning, gentlemen.’ Their gaze sharpened even more with suspicion; you could combine all their ages and no man in that time in this village had been called a gentleman. That was for the absentee land owners, the men who had come every year like the summer ’flu and been just as welcome. ‘What is the name of this village?’

The old men looked at the man who sat in their middle. They all had beards or moustaches, but he had the most magnificent beard of all, a white explosion of hair that hid everything below his nose. He had once been tall but the years had shrunk him; but as he stood up there was no bend in his back. He wore a roughly woven straw hat, baggy blue trousers and a grey blouse from the breast of which hung a brightly polished medal on a faded ribbon. He didn’t lean on his stick but held it as a gentleman might hold a staff of rank.

‘Drazlenka is the name of our village.’ He had a surprisingly young voice, as if time had not been able to get at his throat. ‘Who are you, sir?’

‘My name is Cabell. I’m an American, driving down to Tiflis and then to Batumi to catch the ship for home.’

‘I know Tiflis, I was there once. On my way to my second war, the one in the Crimea against the English.’

‘Your second, war?’

The old man chuckled, like birds chirruping in the nest of his beard. ‘I fought for our Tsar Alexander against Napoleon Bonaparte, I was a drummer boy.’

Napoleon and Alexander? That had been over a hundred years ago. The old man’s mind was wandering; but he was obviously the one who had to be spoken to. He was the village patriarch, the other old men looked to him for their words. In the background the crowd was still silent, their faces no longer laughing and excited but blank.

‘Does the road run right through to Tiflis from here?’ said Cabell, humouring the ancient.

‘One can always find a road,’ said the old man. ‘Perhaps not for the horseless carriage, but for one’s feet. I walked the journey.’

‘A thousand miles? Each way?’

‘It took time. When one was young one had plenty of time.’ Somewhere in the white jungle of beard Cabell guessed the old man might be smiling. ‘Where do you come from now?’

Cabell hesitated, then decided that General Bronevich had probably not come this far south. ‘From Verkburg.’

‘The woman and the children are your family?’

Again he hesitated: would it be safer to lie to the old man? But there was no time for an answer. There was a hubbub across the square behind him. He turned round and saw Eden, Nikolai and the two children being hustled towards him by a group of men. Leading the group, now and again giving Eden and the others a rough shove, was the bald-headed miner.

‘Ah,’ said the old man and Cabell thought he heard the chuckle again. ‘Here comes Comrade Keria. He will ask the questions now.’

He sat down again on his bench and the other old men nodded to him, pleased that he had displayed their authority and dignity. They sat there like honoured guests at some formal function waiting for the festivities to begin. Cabell, watching the group approach, aware of something in the atmosphere that he couldn’t quite grasp, suddenly wondered if the festivities would include a lynching.

The whole village seemed to be gathered in the square now. People flowed out of doorways and streets and lanes, coming quickly but with scarcely a sound other than the clatter of their wooden-soled boots on the cobbles of the square. They crowded in behind the group escorting Eden and the others and for a moment Cabell thought he and the old men were going to be swamped. Then, only two or three yards from him, the miners and the crowd came to an abrupt halt. Eden grabbed the two children and with Nikolai moved to stand beside Cabell.

‘What’s going on?’ he said.

‘I don’t know. The miners came rushing down the street in a lorry. They saw us going into a shop and they pulled up and grabbed us.’

Cabell saw the scared faces of the children and he put an arm round Frederick’s shoulders. He said in English, ‘Now remember, Freddie – keep your mouth shut.’ Then he looked at the bald-headed miner and said in Russian, ‘I am told your name is Keria.’

Keria twisted both little fingers in his ears, a disconcerting habit. ‘Yes, I am Maxim Keria. Chairman of the Drazlenka Soviet of Bolshevik Workers.’

Cabell noticed that only the miners nodded approval of what Keria had just said; the rest of the crowd remained silent and expressionless. But he opened his arms, stepped forward and embraced the bald-headed Bolshevik. ‘Greetings, citizen! Why didn’t you say who you were back up there at the mine?’

Keria’s surprise and puzzlement was no less than that of Eden. She stared at the traitor, wondering how she could have begun to trust him, even to like him. But Cabell, his back to her and the others, had guessed at the consternation that had gripped them. He stepped back from embracing Keria and without turning round said in English, ‘Play along with me. Don’t bugger this up or we’re going to have our asses kicked in.’

‘Watch it,’ she said automatically. ‘And you have the wrong revolution. They were citizens in the French Revolution. They’re comrades here.’

‘Nerves,’ said Cabell, and he was full of apprehension. ‘I lost my cue for the moment.’

Keria, suspicion replacing surprise, making his ugly face even uglier, said, ‘Who are you?’

‘I am Comrade Cabell and I bring you greetings from Big Bill Haywood and the Industrial Workers of the World. Big Bill said to me, Comrade Cabell, he said, go out there to Siberia and tell the workers there that the IWW is right behind them. And, by God we are! Aren’t we, Comrade Penfold?’ He reached behind him, pulled the stunned comrade forward. ‘This is Comrade Penfold, who’s come all the way from England to bring greetings from George Bernard Shaw!’

As he looked at Eden, out of the corner of his eye he saw the white beard twitch in the region of the patriarch’s mouth. Was the old son-of-a-bitch smiling?

‘Greetings from George Bernard Shaw and Keir Hardie and Sidney Webb!’ Eden shouted in a wobbly voice. If her mother and father, the Tory true-blues, could only hear her now …

But Keria was unimpressed. ‘Who are these Industrial Workers of the World? Who is this George Bernard Shaw?’

Eden looked sideways to Cabell. ‘I’d hate to be in England now. I think an earthquake might have just happened.’

‘An earthquake named Shaw? I wish he were here now. We could do with some of his arguments.’

‘What are you talking of in your foreign language?’ Keria demanded. ‘Why do you have a magnificent car like this? Workers don’t ride around in such cars.’

‘They do in England and America,’ said Cabell, trusting to the ignorance of isolation; but out of the corner of his eye he saw the huge white beard twitching again. ‘Soon everyone here in Russia will do the same.’

He sounded ridiculous in his own ears; but he had no other weapon. He tried desperately to remember some of the rhetoric he had heard from the Wobbly organizers on the Texas oil fields, but all that came to mind was the apathy of the workers they had been adressing and the brutal antagonism of the oil-field bosses. Phrases came back to him – ‘Workers of the world unite!’, ‘Sell your labour, not your life!’ – but the iron miners of Drazlenka remained as unmoved as the oil workers of Texas. He might have been Big Bill Haywood addressing a Republican convention.

At last he threw up his hands and looked at Eden. ‘I don’t think I’m getting through. You got any messages from Karl Marx?’

But Eden had messages from no one. She had no ear for political oratory; all she could remember of Trotsky and Kerensky was that they were boring. She gestured helplessly.

‘Well, that’s it, Comrade,’ Cabell said to Keria. ‘Greetings from the Great Outside World.’

‘You are not comrades,’ said Keria and behind him the miners nodded their heads. But the crowd said nothing, did not move. ‘You will be executed after you have been tried.’

‘You have the verdict before the trial?’

But Keria was deadly serious: he had no sense of humour. ‘Just as it was under the Tsar.’

Behind him Cabell felt Frederick stir and he stepped back and put his heel on the boy’s toe. ‘Sorry, kid.’

‘Who are these children?’ Keria demanded, scrutinizing them for the first time. ‘They don’t look like the children of workers. And who is the scrawny one?’ He jerked his head at Nikolai.

‘The children are mine,’ said Cabell. ‘Their mother was Russian but unfortunately she came back for the October Revolution and fell prey to the charms of a workers’ chairman from Georgia. That’s why we are on our way to Tiflis, to ask her to return to our family circle. You want your mother back, don’t you, children?’

The children were a little slow to respond to their substitute father and Eden answered for them. ‘Of course they do.’