The route followed by Paul Yevnovich Burenin took a more northerly direction than those whose destination was the mines of Kara. With others of a revolutionary bent, Paul found himself bound for Kolyma, in the distant regions where snow and ice prevailed.
The longer the journey and the smaller dwindled their band, the more somber they all became. Even one-time comrade Stepniak had grown distant. More and more Paul found his thoughts skipping backward through time and painful circumstances to happier and more pleasant memories. Faces and images, sights and smells, from Katyk and his father’s izba crowded into his mind. For so long he had banished them from his thoughts, as if he could will that former part of his being into nonexistence. Now, however, with his own exile and banishment for crimes against the tsar, he no longer had the mental strength to keep them at bay. With every passing day they intruded closer and closer toward that innermost region of his heart, the heart he had kept hidden and walled up since the day he left Katyk. He now found himself regretting that he had not spoken to the young Prince Fedorcenko and identified himself as Anna’s brother. Such a connection, however slight, would have meant a touch, even if distant, with a sister he had always loved.
Now the prince was gone, Anna was gone . . . they were all gone. He would never see them again.
All the things he had believed in now seemed hollow. It had once seemed so important to oppose the aristocratic league of the tsar and his government. Their goal had been to overthrow the oppressors, thinking it would rid society of all its evils. They had killed the tsar, but what had really changed? Were the rebels really any different from the nobles, down deep where the foundations of life pulsed within them? As they left Tiumen, what could be said to have distinguised him from the young Prince Fedorcenko?
Fragmentary conversations and memories flooded him as he made his way toward a future of empty meaninglessness at Kolyma: happy childhood play in Katyk, walking silently with his father away from the jail in Akulin, his father’s enthusiasm over Paul’s education. He supposed they would always represent the former carefree days of his youth. Even when he thought back to his first introduction to political ideas at the feet of his martyred friend, Kazan, he could not do so without a sense of pleasant nostalgia.
His papa’s hearty laugh . . . Mama’s bustling energy . . . his little brother constantly tagging after him . . . Kazan’s passionate idealism . . .
Anna had always spoken of God in a way that, try as he might, Paul could not understand. She had trusted Him as an all-loving, all-sovereign Father who only wanted good for His children. His ways, she said, were truly beyond understanding, but when we did trust Him, the understanding of His nature grew with it. Paul had not been able to grasp the reality of Anna’s personal God. He had always considered such faith something only for people like Anna and their father, people he thought of as weak and ineffectual.
So many times as he was growing up he had come upon Anna somewhere alone—in a corner of the izba when the weather was cold, out under the willow tree during the warm season, sometimes just walking along through the solitary fields. She always had a smile for him, and was usually either reading or carrying the small Bible of their papa’s. She had read to him occasionally from some favorite passage. She had spoken to him of wisdom.
He could not deny that he yearned for those sweet days now as he trudged along in filth and despair to an uncertain future, exiled to permanent sorrow and loneliness—his life cut short and essentially ended in its very prime. All his ideas, all his passions—where had they left him in the end? Broken and empty, drained of direction and purpose. Even his final act of rebellion, the assassination attempts of the tsar, had been for nothing. The people had responded by spitting in the faces of the heroic assassins, and a new tsar was cheered on to his throne. And the hand of tyranny and repression fell harder upon them, though none seemed to care.
Why should he care anymore?
He had given his life to bring freedom to a people who didn’t want freedom. He had suffered and fought and even murdered for them, but all he had to show for his efforts was . . . nothing. He had watched his friends die for an illusion. How could they have been so foolish? He used to call Anna naive, but she was far less so than he and his comrades who actually believed they could change the world and make a difference. They were all gone, dead, exiled, or simply deserted, and yet the world on as if they had never existed. Nothing changed.
If he could, he’d forget it all and go back to Katyk and till his papa’s meager patch of earth, milk the scrawny cow, and try to prod some life out of that ancient horse Lukiv. He’d marry and have children and break his back every day to try to keep them all from starvation. If the peasants liked that life so much, perhaps there was something to it that he had missed seeing.
Well, he couldn’t go back now even if he did want to, which in all truth he did not. Not, however, because he was afraid of labor or poverty—God only knew he had worked harder and starved more in the city than he ever had at his papa’s—but because he could never look with respect upon those simple peasants again who had refused a chance for a better life.
All he had ever wanted to do was help. What was so terrible in that? What more could a feeling man do when he saw need and injustice?
But it was all over now. Exiled for life. Completely isolated. Even after his hard-labor sentence was over, he would be remanded to some tiny village where he would live out his days as an “enforced resident.” Perhaps since he could read and figure, he could earn a little money as a clerk and find a way to survive. But what good would it do? What good could he do? His life was over.
But even in the midst of his despair, from out of the distant past came Kazan’s words back to him. What was it he had once called Siberia . . . the University of Revolution.
Perhaps . . . just perhaps . . . there might be something more than nothingness and ignominy ahead of him. Kazan himself had escaped exile.
Was it possible that his life might not be over? Regardless, he was not alone. There were still others who believed as he did. Perhaps together, even here in the isolated wastes of Siberia, they might yet have an impact upon the government and the ambivalent masses.
It was something to think about anyway. Something to warm his bones and soothe the hungry ache in his stomach as he marched onward toward whatever destiny lay before him in this empty, desolate land.