The Golden Sabre

‘Why are you travelling with this man?’ Keria glared at her. ‘Are you his mistress?’

‘Watch it,’ said Eden. ‘Not in front of the children.’

For the first time the crowd showed expression. It looked disapproving: adultery was a bourgeois habit. ‘What about him?’ said Keria, jerking his head again at Nikolai.

‘A fellow worker,’ said Cabell. ‘Trotsky himself lent him to me. His very own godson.’

He’s gone too far, thought Eden. But some of the miners looked at Nikolai with new interest and some murmured approval. But Keria was all suspicion. He was trained for the future: trust no one. ‘He can prove that at the trial. Take them away!’

But the Drazlenka soviet had never had any prisoners to try: it did not know where to take them. There was no village jail or police station, no army barracks: they had authority but none of authority’s conveniences. They looked at Keria in bewilderment and he stared back at them, bewildered by his own command. Cabell suddenly wanted to laugh, but he knew the situation was far too serious for any merriment.

Then the white-bearded old man stood up. ‘Put them in the railway waiting room. There is no train for another two days.’

So the enemies of the proletariat were carted off to the railway station. The crowd surged along behind them. Any stranger coming on the scene would have thought that he was witnessing the departure by train of the village’s favourite family. There was no booing or jeering, just laughter and shouting; it was as if now that Keria had made the decision for them, the crowd had come alive again. But if the crowd was now merry, none of its merriment communicated itself to Cabell. With one eye never leaving Keria, seeing the sense of power all at once beginning to swell the man, he knew that the bald-headed miner intended to have an execution if it killed him. He would only be following in the tradition of Russian history: drastic solutions for minor problems. The Tsars had been better teachers than they knew.

Cabell, Eden, Nikolai and the two children were herded into the dusty waiting room. Keria gave instructions to two of the younger miners, then he left, closing the door behind him. Outside the crowd drifted away, but some children remained, their faces pressed against the grimy windows of the waiting room. The two young guards, uncomfortable in their unaccustomed role, sat down on a bench beside the door. The prisoners, equally uncomfortable but for a different reason, stood awkwardly for a moment, then they, too, sat down on the benches around the grimy walls. Above Eden’s head was a fly-spotted time-table; but someone had painted a rough red hammer-and-sickle on it. Behind the red paint of revolution were the schedules of trains that might never run again. Cabell wondered where the train due in two days would be heading, wondered what its passengers would think if they saw five corpses hanging by the neck from the walnut trees outside. But maybe train passengers all over Russia were familiar with such sights now. He just didn’t know. He began to feel more and more remote, as if the real world were sliding away from him.

‘I want to go to the lavatory.’ Olga was pale under her perspiration, afraid and trembling again.

Eden put the request to the two guards. They looked perplexed, not knowing what privileges a prisoner was entitled to. Then the door opened and the white-bearded old man came in. The two youths stood up, but he ignored them. He looked at the prisoners in turn, then he smiled at Eden.

‘A pretty girl. You make an old man feel young again. Or wish he were young.’

‘Thank you, Grandfather—’ Eden wondered if thanks for compliments were in order in such circumstances.

‘My name is Delyanov. Alexander Dmitri Delyanov. I was named after Tsar Alexander. The first Alexander.’

‘Comrade Delyanov—’ One of the guards felt he had better start acting like a guard. ‘Comrade Keria said no one was to come in here—’

‘Stuff Comrade Keria,’ said Comrade Delyanov. ‘I am one hundred and twenty-five years old and I am not going to be ordered about by infants like you. I am wearing trousers older than you—’ He gestured at his baggy patched pants. ‘Get outside! Go on – out!’

Cabell hardly saw the young men exit. He was gazing at Delyanov, trying to make his eyes believe what his ears had heard. He knew of tales of men who lived to a great age in southern Russia; but they had been men from the hills and mountains of Georgia. Perhaps no one had come here to the southern Urals looking for ancients; but he still could not believe that Delyanov was as old as he claimed. A man who had seen Napoleon …

‘Did you – I mean are you really as old as all that?’

Delyanov smiled. ‘You think I am a liar, don’t you, Cabell? You are one yourself, a liar with lots of imagination. It was a pity you were wasting it on clods with no imagination. Yes, I am one hundred and twenty-five years old.’

Frederick gasped and Olga opened her eyes wide. Cabell said, ‘Did you actually see Napoleon Bonaparte?’

‘Of course.’ Delyanov was not offended; he had been asked the question a thousand times. ‘I was at Tilsit in 1807 when the Tsar and the Corsican met on the raft in the middle of the Niemen River. I led the Tsar down to the boat that took him out to the raft, playing my drum. He pinned that medal to my tunic himself.’ He patted the medal on his breast. ‘He was a strange one. He could have been the greatest of them. But—’

‘I want to go to the lavatory,’ said Olga with a full bladder and no sense of history.

‘How many wars have you fought in?’ said Frederick.

‘Three. The war against Napoleon, the one against the Turks and the one against the English. I missed the last two, against the Japanese and against the Germans. I volunteered, but they laughed at me. They laugh at old men sometimes for the wrong reasons.’

‘How have you lived so long?’ Cabell still could not bring himself to believe that Delyanov was as old as he claimed. He looked like a well-preserved seventy at the most.

‘The right food, the right thoughts and baggy trousers.’ He pulled out his trousers to show their bagginess. ‘Tight trousers cut off the blood to your crotch. That’s where a man’s youth is, in his crotch.’

‘Watch it,’ said Eden, nodding at Olga.

‘My dear—’ Delyanov bowed to Olga. ‘I apologize.’

‘Will that awful man Keria really execute us?’ said Frederick.

The old man nodded. ‘He wants to make a name for himself. A name for himself in this village!’ He laughed and for the first time there was the sound of age in his throat: it was an old man’s cackle. ‘When you have seen emperors, as I have … Keria is a little man with little ambitions.’

‘Killing us is a big ambition in my eyes,’ said Cabell. ‘Who owns this village? Don’t people have any say?’

The old man shrugged. ‘This village used to belong to a prince, Prince Vanya Gorshkov.’ Frederick and Olga raised their heads, but Delyanov didn’t notice. ‘He won’t come again. None of those princes will.’

‘Are you a Bolshevik?’ Cabell said.

‘No more than you are, Cabell.’ Delyanov’s beard twitched. ‘I am a realist. The past is past, so I am a Bolshevik if they say I am.’

‘But surely the people won’t let Keria kill us?’ said Eden.

‘Who knows? They are a strange people here. I wasn’t born here – I came here sixty years ago. I am here more years than most of them have lived, but they still say I came from outside. They want to build a wall round Drazlenka now, shut out everyone. This was always a village that hated outsiders. Now that the Prince won’t be back …’

‘Can you help us escape?’

‘I want to go to the lavatory,’ said Olga. ‘I can’t hold it any longer.’

‘I can’t help you escape,’ said Delyanov, ‘but I can escort the young lady to the lavatory.’

He opened the door, stood back to let Eden and Olga go out. He looked back at Cabell and the beard twitched again. ‘You and the boy and the scrawny one will have to attend to your own bladders. Everyone pisses on the railway tracks.’

He went out, closing the door behind him. They heard him snap something at the two young guards, then the door opened and the two youths looked in and jerked their heads at Cabell.

He, Frederick and Nikolai went out on to the small station platform and stood there in a row relieving themselves. Cabell looked south down the railway line, wondering how far it went. Was there another town further on, one where outsiders were hated as much as in this one? He began to appreciate for the first time that they were heading into a part of the Russian Empire that had never really been fully conquered, where the people did not, and possibly never would, see themselves as Russians.

‘I wish they would stop calling me the scrawny one. They all sound like my father.’ Nikolai shook himself, pulled up his trousers and turned back towards the waiting room. Melancholy and insulted, he eyed the two guards who stood watching them. ‘Shot by Bolsheviks. He’ll never forgive me for that.’

‘I doubt if he’ll get to hear of it.’ Cabell tried to sound comforting, a little difficult in the circumstances. ‘How are you, Freddie? You’ve kept your mouth shut pretty well.’

‘I’m going to let them know who I am.’ Frederick waved a strong stream in the air, a golden rapier stroke. ‘So’s they’ll know whom they’re murdering.’

‘Whom? That’s good grammar, Freddie, but poor politics. We’ve got to start thinking of getting out of here.’

Crossing the square with Eden and Olga, Delyanov fluffed up his beard and said, ‘You’re a remarkably pretty girl.’

‘Thank you,’ said Eden, and refrained from saying he had already told her that. She had met lecherous old men before, but never one as ancient as this. She changed the subject away from herself: ‘You sound as if you might have been educated, Mr Delyanov.’

He nodded proudly. ‘I educated myself, taught myself to read when I was forty years old. I met Pushkin – you know, the poet?’

‘I know him.’ She had discovered him when she had come to Russia, almost swooned over Tatiana’s love letter to Onegin.