They called it the journey of the dead.
On the road outside Tiumen the snow had belatedly begun to give way to the pressures of spring, a season in these regions sometimes so short that it seemed to last but a few brief weeks. But winter’s ice and snow might have been preferable to trudging through the knee-deep sludge and mud.
Or thus Paul had concluded as he lifted his kati one more time from the endless mire. The government-issued shoes were expected to last him for months of travel by foot; but it had been only a week since they were issued, and they were already beginning to pull apart at the seams. And the journey had only just begun.
After his arrest he had spent some days in jail before his sentence—without benefit of a trial—was passed: two years of penal servitude, followed by life exile in Siberia. The sentence was less severe than for some political criminals, but no less than he expected.
He was transported from the capital eastward, across the frigid, snowy Urals, and still farther eastward, ever eastward, to Tiumen. The prison had been such a hell that even under these conditions, Paul actually found himself glad to be starting out on the journey which would last weeks, if not months, before reaching his destination.
A convict party of some four hundred prisoners had been organized to embark that week. Such parties set out almost at a weekly rate in any and all seasons of the year. They were given an allotment of several kopecks a day for provisions, and were expected to buy food from local peasants along the way. Noblemen sometimes received an extra kopeck or two. But no other distinction existed between prisoners, either by severity of crime or by sex or age. Women, children, political antagonists, and hardened murderers all traveled together. All wore drab convict gray uniforms, visorless caps, and long overcoats. Those destined for hard labor—as distinguished from the politicals—also wore two-kilo leg fetters and had half their heads shaven, both measures intended to discourage escape.
Paul marveled that already the detail had organized itself into a kind of self-governing unit, quite hidden from the scrutiny of the captain in charge of the guard. The convict body, known as an artel, was headed by the strongest member of the party, in their case a huge murderer that none of the others would dare cross. He collected contributions that went by the droll name of dues. Everyone was expected to pay his share, and with the proceeds, he and his fellow leaders of the artel bribed guards, bought illicit tobacco, helped the sick, hired wagons on which they sold the right to ride, sometimes facilitated escapes, and occasionally—when they thought they could get away with it—lined their own pockets as well.
The pathetic gathering looked like the poorest and most destitute assemblage of peasants that could have been gathered from throughout all Russia. Yet Paul knew that many of his fellow sojourners were men of culture and intellect who had lived lives of comfort and ease in Russia. Their only crime was political dissent—a crime that in Russia ranked among the worst.
One man in particular caught Paul’s attention as they had readied to leave Tiumen. His leg fetters and partly shaven head immediately marked him as a hard-labor convict. Yet he had a look about him completely incongruent with such a designation. He was emotionally beaten, with a look of utter desolation in the vacant staring of his eyes. But in spite of it, he wore a quality of gentility that rags and filth could not hide. Paul wondered what heinous crime such a man could have committed to warrant irons bound to his legs. Probably the writing of a poem that sang the praises of freedom.
Paul’s pensive observations of his fellow prisoners were cut short.
“Gatova! . . . Ready!” cried one of the guards, and the convicts all began to form ranks.
Following the prisoners came a procession of telega, small one-horse wagons on which the sick were to ride along with the privileged nobles. A cordon of Cossack guards on horseback hemmed in the entire procession along both sides, and the captain brought up the rear.
When the diverse assembly was ready, the captain turned in the direction of the prison church, bowed, crossed himself, then gave the order to march. They would be expected to cover about thirty versts (approximately thirty kilometers, or twenty miles) a day, a difficult enough distance over primitive roads for a healthy man, but near torture for a malnourished prisoner in leg irons. Paul had not eaten a decent meal in weeks, but he was not chained and was able to manage well enough. Nevertheless, he was exhausted when the party took their first rest at noon after a grueling fifteen versts.
At the rest stop the convict party was met by a dozen or so peasant women and girls selling food and refreshments. Paul bought a small jug of milk and loaf of black bread from a girl who looked like his little sister Vera. The resemblance was no doubt just a trick of his distraught mind, but it put him in a melancholy mood.
He noticed the prisoner with the genteel bearing some thirty meters away. The young man, who appeared only a few years older than Paul, was sitting with his back up against a tree, too exhausted to care about the muddy earth under him. He had purchased no food, but had rather collapsed almost where he had halted.
Paul walked toward him. “The girls will be leaving soon,” he said. “If you are too tired, I can buy you something.”
The gentleman turned his head slowly, as if with effort, toward the intrusive voice. As he focused momentarily on Paul, something like interest, even the briefest hint of astonishment, seemed to flicker across his otherwise passive countenance. He rubbed his eyes, shook his head with disbelief, then glanced away again.
“You look as though you could use something to eat,” Paul pressed once more.
Still there was no verbal response.
A voice spoke from behind Paul. “You’re wasting your time with that one.”
“What do you mean?” Paul asked, turning around.
“Why, he’s been—” The newcomer suddenly broke off his response as recognition dawned on him. At the same moment Paul also realized that the man was no stranger.
“Stepniak!” Paul exclaimed.
“Well, Pavlikov, they got you too, did they?”
“Yes, but where have you been . . . why have I not seen you?”
“Up in front of the lines. You’ve been back here, I take it?”
Paul nodded.
“So—what happened?”
“Nothing but what was bound to come to us all eventually.”
“Recently?”
“A couple of months.”
“Then tell me, are the rumors we hear true?”
“What rumors?”
“The tsar . . . is the tsar dead?”
“It is true,” answered Paul.
“Then we have succeeded! Why so downcast, Pavlikov? Our imprisonment is a small price to pay.”
“Because Zhelyabov, Perovskaya, Remiga, and Griggovski were all hanged for it.”
Stepniak grimaced. “Poor Remiga,” he said. “He was so young.”
Paul did not comment on the fact that the martyred medical student was at least three years older than himself. But Stepniak continued. “If I had not been arrested, it would have been me instead of him. How did you escape the noose, Pavlikov?”
All their previous differences over the leadership and direction of The People’s Will grew pale in light of the tsar’s assassination, their friends’ deaths, and their own banishment. For whatever good it would do them, they were comrades again.
“Only luck, I suppose,” answered Paul.
“How so?”
“Wrong place, wrong time . . . right place, right time—however you want to look at it. But why are you only now being transported? You were arrested months ago?”
“True,” replied Stepniak. “I should by now be more than halfway to the mines. But fate—or as you put it, dumb luck—interceded. A typhus epidemic struck the prison back there. That’s how I came to be acquainted with that one—”
He jerked his head toward the man sitting against the tree who had shown no interest whatever in the little reunion taking place only a few paces away from him. He continued to stare vacantly into space, absorbed in his own morose and silent world.
“Does he ever talk?” asked Paul.
“He knows how, if that’s what you mean. I heard him talk enough in his delirium.”
“Delirium?”
“He caught typhus also. We were in the hospital together. He almost didn’t make it. Even before he got the typhus, he was in pretty bad shape.”
“From the journey here?”
“No. He’d attempted suicide.”
“What a tragedy. He looks as if he was once a fine man.”
“I feel sorry for him too. But then I have to remind myself that he is an aristocrat. Or rather, was. He is a dead man now, just like all of us. Though I suppose it is worse for those who have something in the first place to have had their rights and property and positions taken from them.”
“No more than most of them deserve,” said Paul, the bitterness of his political leanings showing through again.
“Maybe you’re right. Now the miserable fellow doesn’t even exist except as chattel on a convict gang. Poetic justice, I’d say.”
“Come on, let’s move away from him,” said Paul, feeling awkward talking about the man as if he truly were already dead. Aristocrat or not, the fellow was indeed a pitiful specimen of humanity. Feeling something akin to compassion even for one of the hated nobility, Paul broke off half his hunk of bread and laid it down at the man’s side.
He and Stepniak moved slowly away. The other man took no more notice of their leaving than he had of their arrival. Neither did he seem to note the food that had been laid beside his leg.
“You say he is an aristocrat,” Paul said at length.
“A prince—from St. Petersburg.”
“Do you know who he is?”
“Fedorcenko’s his name.”
Paul’s surprise registered in his sharply raised brow.
“You’ve no doubt heard of him,” said Stepniak.
“One of the capital’s important families—of course I have.” Paul deemed it best even now to say nothing about his sister’s relationship with the Fedorcenko household. “What could he have done that even his family could not have interceded for him?” he added.
“A good question. I’ve known noblemen to murder their brothers and not even be jailed. The entire family must be out of imperial favor.”
“Do you know what he did?”
“Shot his commanding officer—in battle. I know no details. He says nothing about it. Most of what I heard is nothing more than rumor. You know how the low-lifes in a place like this love to spread gossip about one of higher rank than themselves. Not to mention rebels like you and me. Everyone loves to see a high, proud man fall. It’s not often we get someone of his stature in the midst of a convict gang, his legs in irons, his head shaved, and bound for a life in exile.”
“Ironic in a way,” mused Paul.
“But like you said, probably no more than he deserves.”
Paul glanced back at the pitiful object of their conversation. He still hadn’t moved, other than to pick up the piece of bread Paul had left. At least he still knew how to eat, although he chewed on the hard crust so absently that it seemed he hardly knew what he was doing, nor cared.
After the brief hint of recognition when Paul had spoken to him, the face had shown no more sign of life. Paul recalled one or two of Anna’s letters mentioning the prince. He must have known Anna, even if only in passing. And now here they were, sharing bread together a thousand miles away en route to Siberia. Paul, however, gave no consideration to reasons beyond coincidence. Even if, in some dormant corner of his being, the faith of his father still resided, Paul could never have imagined that someone’s prayers could have drawn the two unlikely rebel brothers together. The very notion would strike him as ludicrous that he could be a tool in the hand of that Higher Power he had, in his rebellion, repudiated.
His interest in the poor nobleman who might at one time have known his sister was suddenly diverted. The convicts were roused by the guards from their short rest, followed by the shout of the captain: “March!”
Paul and Stepniak fell in stride together. The crisp air of the budding spring meadow was filled with groans and curses and the rattling of chains. The party heaved forward slowly once more, and for the rest of the day, and indeed most of the rest of that first week, he lost sight of the condemned prince of the House of Fedorcenko. Sometimes it was all he could do to keep himself going, sloshing and trudging through the grass and mud and what snow yet remained.
Days passed, then a week, then two weeks. They would be many months on the road together. There would be plenty of time to resolve any further curiosity Paul may have had about the son of his sister’s employer. The fact that he was here, and in chains, meant that he was as powerless as Paul himself to help in the danger that even now might be drawing its net closer and closer to the sisters of them both.
What did it matter that they were here together? They could not help the princess or Anna. Neither could they help each other.
What did anything matter now?