Summer would make as abrupt an exit from the wastes of southeastern Siberia as its appearance only a short time before. September would not depart before the wind would again moan cold and stiff. But for now, for a blessed few weeks, the days were long and almost warm.
Not a cloud was to be seen in the sky on most days. Even though a quarter of Siberia lay within the Arctic circle, in these regions farther to the south, for all their bitter cold, not much snow, or even rain, fell throughout the year. Pity the poor travelers whose route took them north where nothing but white was to be seen year-round. At least down here, greenery covered much of the frigid landscape.
This was an arid region, despite the fact that through it flowed some of the largest rivers in the world. Dense taiga forests covered the unrelenting land, giving way only to empty high-desert plains where the forests ended. Without a wall, without span of barbed wire, without so much as a single watchtower, it formed the most perfect prison in existence. Where was an escapee to go? How could he survive alone, when the very soil under his feet remained mostly frozen eleven months of the year?
The imperial government, of course, was not inclined to leave security merely in the hands of the elements. It constructed man-made prisons as well, manned their towers and reinforced their walls. Yet with all this, regimes of Russian tsars had for centuries steadily perfected an even more insidious deterrent to escape and rebellion than any prison, than any wilderness, than any punishment could afford.
Stronger than any wall was the rampart of despair.
The mines of Kara lay at the eastern extremity of the Trans-Baikal region of southern Siberia, some four hundred fifty versts from its capital of Chita. Bounded by the Shilka River on the south, the mines themselves were scattered along the Kara River valley for a distance of twenty miles. Accessible only by boat in the summer and sledge across the ice-locked rivers in the winter, there were several weeks in autumn and spring, during which the ice was either forming or breaking up, when the mines were totally isolated from all access to the outside world. No traversable overland route connected Kara in any direction to anywhere.
The mines were the tsar’s personal real estate, worked entirely for the benefit of his purse. Arguably, the operating expenses greatly outdistanced whatever profit came to the emperor. But the mines yet continued in operation. The name Kara was derived from the Tartar word “black,” in reference to the gold-laden black sands of the river. The uses made of the place by the emperor had long since given the appellation a darker meaning.
The Lower Diggings, one of the first settlements along the river, had the appearance of a typical Siberian village. However, the whitewashed tin-roofed officers’ quarters and log barracks of the Cossack guards contrasted harshly with the dilapidated, gloomy prison block. The government buildings had been arranged with some order, intersected by a few broad streets, furthering the village-like impression. On the outskirts of a cluster of buildings scattered along the road leading to the next settlement sat a score or more of poor shanties—ramshackle wooden houses occupied by the convicts of free-command. Those politicals who had completed the hard-labor portion of their sentences resided away from the prison cells themselves. If such an existence could be called “freedom,” the hardy ones who endured their years of toil were free to continue their labor on the tsar’s behalf.
As the sun dropped behind the western hills bordering the mines, the little nondescript village stirred with activity as its residents returned from their labors. From the mines a few walked alone or in groups of two or three in the direction of their own personal hovels. The rest formed a long, drab line of humanity along the road, shuffling listlessly toward the prison enclave—apathetic, unsmiling, unfeeling. The gall of their despair weighed down their spirits more heavily than the day’s work had tired their muscles or the chains dragged down their legs as they walked. The gates of the compound swung wide for them, but they responded not with a shout of relief at returning home, but with a rusty groan as from a floundering ship about to break on the shoals of despond. Awaiting them was only a vermin-infested barracks and a meal of doughy black bread, watered-down soup with a sliver of discolored meat, and tea if they were fortunate. This sparsity they ate on their bare-boarded bunks, after which most fell quickly into an exhausted sleep without blanket or pillow or even so much as a layer of straw for a mattress.
Onetime Prince Sergei Viktorovich Fedorcenko chewed on his broken life with little more enthusiasm than he showed the bland, rubbery hunk of bread. Since the beginning of their journey, the artel had been broken and its original members sent in two or three diverse directions to different destinations. By the time Sergei’s senses finally began to come back to him, Paul was on his way farther northward. He never knew whose hand had fed him, or how close he had been to one he once had loved.
Sergei’s senses had gradually returned as he had trekked with the others of his party across the lowlands north of Mongolia. Thoughts came back. He remembered. But he had allowed no hint of former dreams to clutter his desolation. He wore his bitterness like his tattered gray coat, hugged to his body against the late-evening chill. He wore it as a badge, more vivid than the convict tattoo on his forehead. To the others of the artel he had come to be known as Pokoinik, the dead one, an epithet once applied to none other than Dostoyevsky during his own sojourn in Siberia, and thus especially fitting to the young prince who had once dreamed of spending his days, like the great novelist before him, weaving stories of Russian life. Sergei no longer dreamed of writing stories, for all the hopes that gave rise to tales had grown more bitter than bile. The name his fellow travelers had given him held fast.
Shifting his wracked frame on the hard, cold boards, he found it difficult to even dredge up hope enough for recriminations. Whom could he blame for his plight? A government whose injustice and irresponsibility had driven him to the extremities of violence, madness, and suicide? A war whose atrocities still revolted him, even at the very memory? A moment of insanity that had made of him the animal he had hated in his commander?
No. What was the use in blame? Blame was a luxury only for those who hoped for some vindication.
In a moment of blind and desperate frenzy, caught in the horrifying battle-slaughter where mothers and children were being cut down along with warriors, his reason had snapped like a dry twig. Unable to witness one more death, although the battlefield was already strewn with thousands, he had made himself an instrument of death as well. He had thought nothing of the consequences. He had not considered right or wrong. His numbed mind was still too crazed with guilt over the woman his own horse had trampled to death.
He had not thought . . . he had only acted. And with his act, his very power of thought had seemingly been taken from him.
Suddenly he was bound and chained and imprisoned and tried and sentenced and sent on a march that now seemed like the only life he had ever known. Time had lost all meaning. He had no idea how long he had been gone, only that somewhere in the journey he had been deathly sick. They told him he had tried to take his own life, but he remembered nothing of it. In truth, he remembered little of anything. Most of the time he had not even remembered Anna. Faint sensations fluttered at his heart upon occasion, but the one who seemed to be calling to him never came into focus.
But as he had walked, gradually the effects of the typhus lessened. And in spite of the exhausting regimen, by degrees his bodily strength began to come back. With soundness of limb, once again his mind slowly began to function. Sights, sounds, memories began to intrude where had been only a void for so many months.
His arrival at Kara had snapped his mind from the trap of insanity. As thought processes slowly took hold, the reality of his situation dawned all too clear. There would be no blame, no recriminations, no vengeance. Perhaps he would never write again, never see civilization again. And perhaps he was indeed a pokoinik. But he would not attempt again to achieve that end by his own hand. If dead he must be, it would not be by the tsar’s guards at this hellish place. It would not be from his own doing, nor would he ever again carry a weapon on a battlefield to die fighting innocent enemies of the great Russian state. If he was to die, he would die with purpose.
His was a life beset with ironies. He blamed neither himself, nor his father, nor Rustaveli, nor the tsar, nor anyone. If he was going to be called “the dead one,” at least he would earn the name.
He could not—would not—stay here enduring a living death for all his days. He would drown in the river, freeze in the bitter wastelands, or starve in the taiga wilderness.
But he would not stay . . . never to die, and yet never to live.