Captain of the Steppe E-Book

Oleg Pavlov

• Herausgeber: And Other Stories
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: Tales from the Last Days
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 318

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

It was easy to fall into Karabas, as easy as falling down a hole, but it was hard, to put it bluntly, to get out again. Never mind the zeks, even the soldiers were exiled ...' Deep in the desolate steppe, Captain Khabarov waits out his service at a camp where the news arrives in bundles of last year's papers and rations turn up rotting in their trucks. The captain hopes for nothing more from life than a meagre pension and a state-owned flat. Until, one Spring, he decides to plant a field of potatoes to feed his half-starved men ...This blackly comic novel shows the unsettling consequences of thinking for yourself under the Soviet system. Oleg Pavlov's first novel, published when he was only 24, Captain of the Steppe was immediately praised for its chilling but humane and hilarious depiction of the Soviet Empire's last years. The first in a trilogy, this novel already confirms Pavlov as a worthy successor to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Leseprobe

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First published in the UK in 2013 byAnd Other Stories91 Tadros Court, High Wycombe, Bucks, HP13 7GF, United Kingdom

www.andotherstories.org

Copyright © Oleg Pavlov 1994Published by arrangement with ELKOST Intl. Literary AgencyEnglish language translation copyright © Ian Appleby 2013Introduction copyright © Marcel Theroux 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transported in any form by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book.

The right of Oleg Pavlov to be identified as Author of Captain of the Steppe (original title Kazennaya skazka) has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

ISBN 9781908276186eBook ISBN 9781908276193

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

This publication was effected under the auspices of the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation TRANSCRIPT programme supporting translations of Russian literature.

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Contents

Introduction, by Marcel Theroux 1 · Once Upon a Time 2 · Potatoes 3 · Comrade Skripitsyn 4 · A Matter of State 5 · Released 6 · A Passion for Orders 7 · The Whole Truth 8 · A New Era 9 · A Feat in Winter 10 · For Glory, and for the Peace of His Soul Epilogue List of Characters Glossary and Note on Military Ranks

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Dedicated to Russian captains, those strongest of servicemen, on whose hard graft, aye, on whose hard graves our Empire-state reposed through the centuries. May they never be forgotten.

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‌Introduction

The steppe where this story unfolds is the vast grassy plain which sweeps across the heartland of the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan. In Kazakh, it is known as Saryarka, the yellow steppe. It is a place vividly recreated in Oleg ‌Pavlov’s novel – its endless grass, its changing light, its mud, its snow, and the fierce Buran wind that blows over it in winter.

The Kazakh steppe forms part of the vast Eurasian steppe which rolls between Russia and its former empire in Central Asia. It is a place of bewildering size. I have crossed parts of it by train and by air. Its hugeness is disorienting. In such a landscape, individual human beings and their struggles seem diminished in dignity and significance.

During Soviet times, the Kazakh steppe was a place of exile and punishment. Prisoners served out their sentences doing forced labour in the notorious Karlag system of camps, which centred on Karaganda – a city proverbial in Russian for being in the middle of nowhere.

In Captain of the Steppe, Pavlov’s subject is the lives of the most transient and isolated of the steppe’s inhabitants: a company of soldiers at a remote penal colony during the last decade of Soviet power. The men are guarding prisoners – in camp slang, zeks – at an outpost in Karabas, forty or so kilometres from Karaganda. The zeks are almost certainly mining coal for Soviet factories. In fact, the prisoners themselves are dealt with only glancingly. Pavlov’s main interest is in the lives of a handful of the soldiers, in particular Captain Ivan Yakovlevich Khabarov, who is the book’s hero.

A decent and conscientious officer, Khabarov is coming up to his retirement. A more pragmatic man would see out his final days at the camp and leave. Not so Khabarov.

The American novelist Kurt Vonnegut laid it down as a principle of good storytelling that ‘every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water’.The desire that moves Khabarov is just as primal and only slightly more grandiose. Frustrated by the rotten rations sent out to his troops along with year-old copies of Pravda, he is inspired to find a solution. The plan he comes up with is very simple: he decides to grow a crop of potatoes in order to feed his men.

Despite his ignorance of agriculture and the reluctance of the hungry troops, who can’t see the sense in burying something you can eat, Khabarov perseveres with his scheme. And as he is repeatedly thwarted, his sensible and humane plan begins to take on the dimensions of a tragicomic obsession.

Khabarov’s single-minded pursuit of his mission triggers a series of unexpected episodes, misunderstandings and unforeseen outcomes that could be called farcical if the novel’s overall key wasn’t so resolutely minor. Most significantly, he finds himself pitted against the shady special investigator Skripitsyn, a man whose opponents have an unfortunate tendency to perish in fires.

During his military service in the 1980s, Oleg Pavlov himself worked as a camp guard in northern Kazakhstan, and the book is packed with the kind of detail that assures us of the author’s experience in this world. Pavlov confidently recreates the soldiers’ slangy and abrasive speech; he is a connoisseur of the malodorous atmosphere of the camp, the operations of the latrines, and the bathhouse which smells ‘as though they were drying out damp cats’. There is a note of personal bitterness when he compares a character to one of ‘those medical orderlies, posted to obscure military hospitals … who, if they treat you, will surely cripple you’.

Captain of the Steppe was first published in Russia in 1994, when its author was twenty-four, and became the first in a loose trilogy about the lives of men working in the prison system of Soviet Kazakhstan. It is an almost purely male world. Female characters in Captain of the Steppe include only a telephone receptionist, a train driver, a faithless wife and some Kazakh women encountered during wanderings on the steppe. The book has a young man’s relish for ribaldry and knockabout humour, but there is pathos too.

Pavlov does not aim for a naturalistic depiction of the life of the camp – the sort that is so hauntingly achieved in the stories of Varlam Shalamov. Instead, Pavlov imbues his world with a very particular flavour: the mixture of tragedy, absurdity and black comedy that runs in the veins of Russian literature as far back as the work of Nikolai Gogol.

The spine of the story is Khabarov’s mock-heroic quest for his potatoes, but Pavlov has a Gogolian fondness for excursions into the lives of his minor characters: the morose Cossack Ilya Peregud, who knows how to make vodka out of ‘rice, wheat, rotten apples, wood chips, old women’s headscarves or sour cabbage soup’; the villainous Skripitsyn and his hapless sidekick Sanka Kolodin; or the incompetent Colonel Pobedov, who presides over an organisation which enacts in miniature the failings of the entire Soviet system:

By then he already considered himself an eminent military commander, not knowing – because they weren’t reporting it to him – that the soldiers were escaping from the companies and the zeks from the camps, where the guards standing sentry were drunk and asleep; that the officers were fighting over the most insignificant appointments and promotions, while in the more distant locations there were unholy levels of drunkenness; that everywhere the very plaster was coming away.

Hanging over the book is the knowledge that, within a very few years, the Soviet Union will cease to exist, and the province in which the prison camp stands will become part of the newly independent nation of Kazakhstan.

Captain of the Steppe can be read as a satire on the absurdity and chaos of the decaying Soviet empire, but in the end it is Captain Khabarov’s struggle that stays in the reader’s mind. He is an obsessed but decent individual trying to do his best in a world which finds his altruism both unfathomable and threatening. And in telling the story of Khabarov’s obsession and its impact on those around him, Pavlov fashions a disquieting and comic elegy for the foot soldiers of a vanished nation.

Marcel TherouxLondon, 2013

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Captain of the Steppe

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Once Upon a Time

They used to deliver newspapers like potatoes to the company stationed out in the steppe: a month’s worth at a time, or two, or even enough to see them through to spring, so as not to waste fuel and not to pamper the unit. They were last year’s papers, sent from the chaotic regimental reading room where they took whatever was left in the binders of back issues. But even though the papers were tattered, when they reported something big that had taken place long ago, unknown to the soldiers, they found tears could be squeezed from their eyes. To find out so late and yet so suddenly about all the world’s events drove the soldiers to squander what remained of their lives; lives that were in any case wasting away. Even amidst this dereliction of duty, you could hear them drearily going over and over what they had read, reluctant to forget. Word by word, the discussions among the servicemen grew more heated, each man developing his particular opinion and, if suddenly some bigger and more significant event came to light, yet without any clear political line, it would end in fisticuffs.

Captain Khabarov expected nothing from life. If he ever planted himself in a group of these textual analysts, he would furtively mix his long-standing personal anguish into the general unease arising – or so they maintained – from the international situation.

Ivan Yakovlevich Khabarov had wound up in government service neither through calculation nor through coercion; mind you, his own free will hadn’t played much part either. So they had shaved his head and taken him as a soldier, as they did everyone. He served out his time. But when his term as a conscript was up, they persuaded him to stay on as a sergeant major. ‘Stay put, Ivan, carry on serving. This is the right place for you. You’re not one of them civvy bastards, are you?’

The military man in Khabarov could be detected in his mean, crude features. The sergeant major was a thickset, stocky man who resembled a great sack of potatoes. This made him unremarkable, comparable to maybe another million servicemen just like him. However, this million formed a mass of people within which each individual disappeared without trace. He was fated – here’s the truth – to be suspended in it like some sort of clot. Anyway, he stayed in the service for the rations and the pay packet, which wouldn’t buy much in the way of treats. No matter what happened, Khabarov would think, ‘There’s no way around it; just have to put up with it.’ And he also thought, no matter what happened, ‘This isn’t over yet.’

Now in dusty captain’s epaulettes, Khabarov was serving out the rest of his natural life in one of the camp companies in the Karaganda region. He’d been shunted around the prison camps from Pechora to Zeravshan for longer than any hardened criminal, yet he hadn’t been promoted any higher.

The place in the steppe where Captain Ivan Yakovlevich Khabarov was now serving was called Karabas. This is what the Kazakhs had dubbed it. In their language, the name meant something like ‘The Black Head’. However, there were by now no Kazakhs to be seen anywhere near Karabas. They had settled on far-off collective farms, raising sheep. From time to time the steppe-dwellers would come into the settlement for a quick look at the camp, and in the hope of maybe getting their hands on a bit of ironmongery. And when they were asked how the place had come to inherit such a dour name, the Kazakhs looked round shiftily and confessed that they didn’t know where their forefathers had got this notion of blackness or how they had contrived to see a head in the midst of this desolate expanse of steppe. The hills that surrounded the place like grey smoke did not look remotely like heads, while their stony ridges darkened in the dank weather to look more like tree stumps. Mind you, there was space and to spare. No plant life, nor agriculture, nor rivers troubled the good steppe earth. There was no crowding. It wasn’t because of the space, though, that people had settled there. They were to build a prison camp; the site was chosen as if someone had spat there, purely out of malice, and there they had set about living.

Karabas was divided into two parts, of which the more unassuming was the sentry company quarters, while the other, all too visible – like some great barge on the steppe – was the camp itself. Both the company quarters and the camp had been built at the same time, but they had suffered many batterings over the years, while temporary structures had been put up and pulled down with equal abandon. In all its time, the settlement had never seen shops, public amenities, houses or churches. There were only cheerless barracks, exactly like kennels, right down to the idiot howl of the guard dogs that echoed around them. Boots had trodden out pathways stretching towards the barracks. The paths were so narrow, it was as though people had been walking along a rim, afraid to fall. These paths led away to dead ends, breaking off where the sealed zones and other strictures began. Access to Karabas was by a narrow-gauge railway that parted company from the main line far beyond the hills. Another route away from the camp led to a barely visible graveyard, where the sickbay buried unclaimed zeks. At this site, from time to time, freshly dug soil would appear. These were all the connections, as it were, all the ways in and out. If truth be told, in Karabas only the barrack lice circulated freely, two-timing the soldiers with the zeks at will, and vice-versa. The lice paid each other visits, eating and drinking, and multiplying a hundredfold. Meanwhile the men suffered from itchiness and squashed the little monsters in the midst of their festivities, which created a bond between them stronger than a mother’s love.

Not counting the livestock, Karabas was inhabited by soldiers, zeks, volunteer workmen and prison warders. The zeks and the soldiers lived here for years, seeing out their terms, which meant military service for some and imprisonment for others. A small factory had been built in the camp where they knocked together boots, always to the same pattern, boots that weighed a ton, for just such camps as this. The working days exhaled sour cabbage soup; long and oppressive, they welled up as though from ancient depths.

The soldiers stayed alive on their pay and rations. There hadn’t been a pay rise in decades, but there hadn’t been a pay cut either. On the quiet, it’s true, there were mutterings that they were long overdue a raise for this sort of service. On the basis that a substantial portion of their wages was being embezzled, they would serve still more slackly, so as not to lose out. Meanwhile their commanders were glad to take every opportunity to declare that they were carrying out their duties poorly and being paid for nothing. And that’s where things were left. In the summer, rations would be cut to try and save at least a little something for the winter, while in the autumn, similarly, they wouldn’t get quite enough, as rations were kept aside, in reserve. But when January stole up unannounced, these reserves would barely feed a sparrow, and no one knew why they had gone hungry for so long. Your zek, now, he’ll demand what’s his even if he has to slit his own throat. Your warder, he’ll steal it on the sly, so where’s a serviceman to find his cut? You can’t exactly weigh what comes in from the regiment. They say that the supplies meet regulations, but which regulations? Who knows? They ration by gross weight, as though they don’t understand that grain settles out, or shrinks when cooked, or generally just vanishes away. Instead of proper nourishment, just that dreadful army margarine. And the fat is like water: you’ll never feel full, and your very soul is repulsed by it. Instead of apples: dried fruit. They substitute this hot, tarry, tea-like concoction for actual tea. No matter where you look, they’re scrimping and saving. Put plainly, the men weren’t serving so much as surviving the best they could; and if you did manage to stuff yourself full, then for some reason you’d lose all your will to live.

The captain never let slip a word of complaint about his fate. Complaining meant picking someone to blame or evading responsibility, and these were things he did not know how to do. When he’d ended up in the sentry company, Khabarov had soon understood that there was no real military service here. There was just the same misery for everyone, the same toil: hauling this barge of a camp and all who sailed upon her, all struggling to keep down a rising seasickness. This was why he didn’t like the camp commanders and had no respect for the peripatetic courts, when gawpers would crowd into the club building and sentences would be passed, even when for once the guilty copped it. This was a misfortune, and as at funerals, only those nearest and dearest should be present. A solitary individual shouldn’t be held up for display and abuse. Khabarov plodded along under the camp’s yoke, making life easier neither for himself, nor for the zeks, nor for the soldiers. Each man served out his time in the camp, but there, where they would only have died alone, they lived en masse, kept on their feet by being crammed together so tightly that not even a dead man could fall.

Only in winter did a sleepy silence hang heavy over the settlement, and a grimy off-white calm seep through, sending Karabas into hibernation. Throughout this long period, you could remember how life had abated, and the remembered warmth would heat you like a stove. The captain liked to drift away in this heat, which also soothed the sting of his many snubs and setbacks.

If it were possible, now that we have painted this picture of the camp settlement’s expanse, to turn from the height we have already attained to its depths, then we’d have to fall like a stone into the barracks square, striking the eternally drunk Ilya Peregud, a man so huge that even without taking aim you would always hit.

Ilya Peregud served in the company in all the unfilled posts – those insignificant, transient jobs that won’t make a man a commanding officer, but burden him with the mundane chores: counting the sheets in the stores, making sure the dogs have been fed. Karabas suffered from a permanent shortage of personnel, so all these duties fell to Peregud. He had first caught the captain’s eye as a prison warder, being quite lost in that position. The captain had led him by the hand, like a little orphan child, across into his company. Ilya’s heart and soul ran on vodka. Mind you, he wasn’t keen on moving; he was usually to be found, like a bear in his den, at one of his posts, more often than not in the stores. Peregud would be located in a dark box room, which space he filled completely: a veritable coffin. Going in, a person would take Ilya for a dead man: he’d be sat there, his huge head with the topknot apparently ready at any moment to tumble off his great mound of a torso. One arm of this mighty warrior would rise into the air like a mountainside, and in the gloom a glugging noise would be heard, and then Ilya, sighing with relief after quenching his thirst. ‘Just who are you? Are you a Cossack?’ Peregud would ask pointedly, failing to recognise who had walked in. And then he’d answer himself, ‘Well, I am a Cossack!’

It scarcely needs saying that Peregud didn’t do a bloody thing about any of his duties. There was nothing he was able to do, in fact, apart from inspire respect. The dogs were not fed, the sheets not counted. But the disorder that reigned on his account throughout the company made life the merrier for everyone; they used to love taking the piss out of him. He was, in fact, an unrivalled source of entertainment. Peregud had never once in his life hit anyone, for fear of killing them. If they wound him up too much, he would just bellow in warning, ‘You dare take the piss out of me? Out of a Cossack?’ Or he would glower and get angry. He might punch a hole in something – one of the walls, maybe – in front of them and instantly regain their respect. From time to time, though, he would be seized by fear, as other people sometimes get aches in their bones before it rains. Once it happened that during one of these episodes someone whispered to Peregud that a patrol wagon was after him. So Ilya went and climbed under the cots in the barracks, and the soldiers deliberately kept him scared: ‘You lay there, maybe they won’t find you.’ And there he lay, not moving, thinking it was all true. Then he was dragged out from under the bunks by the deputy political officer, Vasil Velichko, a man who always spoke the truth and stood up for the unfortunate.

As regards Vasil Velichko, the men themselves would tell you he was the sort of man who held nothing back and kept no secrets. This is the man we should have started with, in fact, if only Peregud hadn’t turned up. Peregud could have waited, he wouldn’t have gone anywhere, and he’d put up with anything so long as you poured vodka into his heart. But just you try and move past him!

If they had said to Captain Khabarov that Peregud had hidden himself under the cots, a stunt the soldiers had scared him into trying, he wouldn’t even have stood up, let alone drop the matters that he was busy with. But Velichko, now, Velichko rushed off, all aflutter. That was the kind of man he was; he wanted to save everyone and change everything on earth!

It was easy to fall into Karabas, as easy as falling down a hole; but it was hard, to put it bluntly, to get out again. Never mind the zeks, even the soldiers were exiled, hidden deeper in the steppe, when they didn’t pass muster at the regimental base. This Khabarov knew to be true, and when they had suddenly sent him a deputy political officer from the regiment, he had been scared that the newcomer would turn out to be completely beyond hope, one of those who had nothing to lose. On his very first day, Velichko organised a political-awareness class, sticking up some pretty good posters around the barracks, and daubing slogans there, too, although not many of the men understood what the slogans were exhorting them to do. The captain was even surprised by the meanness of the regimental commanders: why did they have to send a blessed fool like that away? They could have let him flutter about with his slogans at headquarters. Noting, later, that the company now had political classes and briefings, plus a cell of the Young Communist League, Khabarov grew depressed and muttered, ‘This is all going to end badly.’

Every single story deputy political officer Velichko had about himself included the exclamation ‘I became convinced’, which was soon succeeded by ‘I have overcome’, but they all presented one and the same picture: he would start doing something, but then drop it as he got caught up in something else, and he would never see anything through to the end. According to his tales, he used to believe in God, but then lost his faith, and began practising body-temperature conditioning. ‘I became convinced that a man can have control over himself, that he should be healthy and find joy in life!’ Velichko exclaimed. And then, with the same feverishness, he took to recounting how he had lost faith in temperature conditioning when he understood that first you need to make everyone’s life happy and joyful. ‘I became convinced of this, it’s the most important thing, do you understand? First we need to build communism! It’s bad for a person when it’s bad all around, but all together we can change the world!’ The entire trajectory of Vasil Velichko’s path through life was this: he had been getting by quietly in the service, but then he asked to transfer to the political department and be a propagandist, after which he was sent to serve in Karabas, probably so that nobody on earth would have to hear any more about him.

The soldiers loved their deputy political officer. Khabarov, he was alien. They feared him, or respected him. You could have a drink with Peregud, though it was like being with an old bloke. But Velichko brought posters and slogans with him, and from the very first days he hung out with the soldiers, even using the polite form of ‘you’ to them to start with, because the soldiers were the very people with whom he planned to change the world. Yet since he had to bring everyone round to his way of thinking, something special and sincere came about that would never have happened if he had set out to change everything by himself. If your stomach aches, go see Velichko, complain about it! If you want to pour your heart out, go see him, he’ll listen all night, if need be! And while Khabarov still took the deputy political officer for a windbag, he began to treat him more gently, understanding that Velichko was genuinely trying his best on the men’s behalf, never mind if his efforts brought little result. Anyway, could one man change everything?

A passionate dispute soon arose between Khabarov and Velichko, which bound them closer than any blood transfusion. The captain was forever putting things to one side for future use, and then eking out his stores for a long time. Even if there was enough of everything, he would still put something aside, expecting a plague, almost as though inviting disaster. The soldiers understandably grew downcast at these economies and lost all faith in the future. The deputy political officer was deeply troubled by this, and he would round on the captain whenever he tried to make a saving. Their silent battle, although it was certainly cantankerous at times, lasted for months, and it would have cost the captain nothing to overpower the fragile, dreamy political officer, but seeing his despair and pain, Khabarov surrendered. Peregud had popped up and made him laugh: ‘Here, Ivan, give over with the starvation diet. The deputy political officer is right. Turn it around, you prick. Make all the cuts you want for yourself, but don’t touch the men!’ The system was shattered. Ivan Yakovlevich could hardly bear to look on as Velichko scattered his years of ant-like efforts to the wind for the sake of a single day’s slackening of the reins. But seeing all this, he stayed submissively quiet. You would have thought that Vasil – and Peregud, for that matter – was a burden to him, and didn’t provide the slightest assistance, but here’s a funny thing: this burden made the captain’s life cosier and his service easier.

No one admitted aloud that they needed anyone else, but the admission, albeit tacit, was there in the communal living arrangements made by this trio in the company’s administrative office. Khabarov had moved in there ages ago. In Ugolpunkt – a little place not too far away, reached via the narrow-gauge line from Karabas – there was a separate brick-built hostel for the camp-workers in which it was possible to obtain a place to sleep. But the poky rooms there were shared between five, even for the family men. So the captain reckoned it would be more peaceful to live in his office. After Velichko had tried life with the camp warders and their unrefined families, he asked if the captain would let him have a billet. And then Ilya, when he had registered that the company commander and the deputy political officer were living right alongside him, followed a rule of staying at theirs as a guest every night. They billeted him on the floor, which suited him fine. After this, Khabarov was ashamed ever to think of driving him out again, which would be to deprive him of his pleasure, even if Ilya had decidedly impinged on their space and, what’s more, afflicted them with conversations, the kind without beginning or end.

The air in the office became potent: as they breathed it, so they lived. Sometimes it would be Khabarov who hit the bottle, although you’d never believe he might go on a bender because, even when he drank, he did so stiffly, as though seeing someone off on a long journey. If he ever got drunk suddenly, all out of nowhere – and when he did, he would drink non-stop – it was only ever when a bit of gloomy time off, a veritable new dawn, turned up in his usual pointless routine. It was precisely during these peaceful times that, totting it all up, the captain would fancy there was no value to his life. When he was drunk, though, he didn’t stagger around the company. He slept the sleep of the dead, which is to say he lay on his cot without even taking his boots off. Ilya would sleep on the floor by the captain’s side like a dog, scaring away anyone who came in with his growl. Once a day, though, he would prod Ivan Yakovlevich to make sure that the captain was still alive.

Khabarov would need maybe a week to sleep it off, and then he would realise that the running of the place had been abandoned and would quit his drinking with ease.

Velichko was the only one who would have stayed teetotal. However, he too would sometimes start drinking, while attempting to re-educate Peregud, to turn him away from drunkenness. Peregud would promise, ‘Enough. I swear. Not a drop, as my life depends on it. So come on, for the last time, let’s share a glass together. Here, Vasiliok, listen, don’t offend me. Drink to my new life!’

The deputy political officer would ask, ‘Are you honestly going to stop drinking?’

‘Cossack’s honour, or don’t you believe me?’ Velichko would feel ashamed, and he hurriedly acquiesced, even though the vodka hit him like a truncheon, weakened as he was by the healthy lifestyle he’d been leading for so long.

Occasionally Velichko and Peregud would stage a mutiny, shouting, ‘There’s nothing for people to eat, there’s no discipline left in the country, it’s thief against thief!’ Khabarov feared such conversations. He would suddenly interrupt: ‘Quit going over the same old nonsense. We’d do better to have a drink. Let’s have another little drink.’ And he’d drink too. When he poured vodka on these troubled conversations, Khabarov more often than not exceeded his limits, and would again get extremely drunk all of a sudden. He would start to excoriate the authorities and the regulations so fiercely that Velichko and Ilya would turn pale, then red, and run out of the office like men possessed. In the end, Peregud would deliberately lay himself down to sleep on the floor and start snoring loudly: either he wanted to drown out the captain’s tirades so that no one overheard him, or he was genuinely falling asleep, and this snoring was something that happened to him when he got scared in his sleep.

Khabarov could only set stuff aside from what was brought in. He could not siphon off a little something for himself, bypassing his superior officers – there was nothing to be had. Velichko complained more and more, and grew downcast. He used to dream about making everyone on earth happier, but he was driven to tears of torment by the fact that that he had caught lice in Karabas. He tried various scientific methods to rid himself of the parasites, but the lice would crawl back onto him straight away from the others.

One day, Velichko cancelled his political education class, saying, ‘Forgive me, everyone, for lying to you all, because I raised questions then gave incorrect answers.’ With something approaching joy, Khabarov replaced the political classes with domestic chores for the soldiers, who, mind you, got out of them easily, as ever. Seeing that no one appeared to be sorry about what had happened, Velichko felt his loneliness in Karabas even more acutely. Only the captain knew about the dispatch the deputy political officer had written in which he had requested to be discharged. However, a spiteful response came from somewhere, which was only to be expected. Five years was what he had left to serve, and he couldn’t strip himself of his epaulettes, as according to the regulations this would make him a deserter.

A gunshot rang out in the office, followed by a long scuffling noise. The deputy political officer was found still alive. His eyes bulged. He was flapping his heavy-lipped mouth noiselessly. It was as if the bullet had nailed him to the floor. He had shot himself in the chest, much higher than the heart, as though he either did not really want to die or he did not know for sure where his heart actually was. As it was, his wound – just a little hole in his tunic – did not scare the men who had run in. The captain was late to appear in the office, when Velichko was already motionless, out cold on the floor. He was lying full length, and deathly quiet.

Ivan Yakovlevich ran for the camp, to demand assistance from the infirmary. He was gone for a long time: the zeks sector lived its own life, under its own officers and regulations. The military doctor who the captain tracked down, once he’d hurled twisted obscenities at everyone and everything to the extent that it was a wonder anyone could still understand him, got to work in an instant. The servicemen dispersed back to their sties, finding out over the course of that day that Vasil’s life had been saved in the infirmary after all. The next morning, a vehicle arrived from the regiment, and only those who were loitering round the gatehouse, including Captain Khabarov, who happened to be passing by, got to see Velichko for the last time, as they were carrying him off.

There came rumours that Velichko had been recovering in the hospital, but they’d been curing him, it turned out, in order to pass sentence upon him. The head of the regiment’s internal discipline enforcers – the ‘Special Department’ – arrived in Karabas, a man by the name of Smershevich. He was horrid in appearance: plump, fond of good food, and of drink. As well as this, though, he was hard, slab-like, with dark glinting eyes sunken in beneath his forehead. Eyes that, with his sour, forever dissatisfied expression, he would use unapologetically to transfix every man he met, as though seeing right through them. Everything about him made plain that people were worth nothing to him. He also had a crippled arm: a lonely false hand, covered in leather, did not quite conceal the stump of his right wrist. He wielded this false hand like a cudgel: he’d wave it in the air or, far from attempting to shake your hand, he would thrust it right in your face. Actually, Smershevich did not know how to interrogate; no matter how much he huffed and puffed, he just brought all his backwardness to bear, pressing down with threats, hurling invective from all sides and tossing around tired old imprecations. ‘Who are you covering for? That liar? That anti-Soviet element? I used to trip over him back at the regiment. That’s when he should have been crushed!’

Khabarov remained silent, and Smershevich could not do anything with the captain. However, he fixed Khabarov in his mind and parted thus: ‘You maggot, you’ll see, you’ll make quite a stink when they crush you.’

Afterwards, there was a hearing at the regiment where Vasil Velichko, already demoted and maimed for life, was expelled from the Party and sentenced to imprisonment by his peers. They also demanded the steppe captain’s presence at the court, so that they’d know in Karabas, too, what punishment could be meted out for refusing to serve the motherland. Khabarov did not go. For the first time in his life, he did not follow an order. However, nothing came of it. Maybe they had only demanded it of him to tick a box. Maybe they’d decided that he too should suffocate in that dead end of his.

The regiment begrudged sending out a fresh person to replace Velichko. They raised Khabarov’s own pay by a kopeck so he could take on Velichko’s duties. So the captain, as though by some cruel joke, stepped up a rank, appointed to be his own personal deputy political officer. This duty depressed him: scarcely a day went by when Velichko didn’t come into his mind. And then, too, Peregud began to be tormented by panic attacks: he shut himself up in his storeroom and rarely went outside. So Ivan Yakovlevich Khabarov was left completely alone.