No man in the camp has a bad word to say about the deputy commander, Colonel David Pazhari. As Lieutenant General Mishenkov’s absences grow longer and more frequent, Pazhari is seen as the regiment’s acting commander. While Mishenkov is away, Pazhari could choose to do whatever he liked. He could drink fine wines from dawn to dusk, smoke excellent cigars, or fornicate with the local women. But sometimes, when one meets a St Petersburg aristocrat, one realises that certain things tolerated in the capital are not tolerated elsewhere.
The deputy commander is tall, broad-shouldered and has a chiselled face. His yellow hair, which flops across his forehead like an egg yolk, is carefully trimmed at the back in a straight line that would make a draughtsman proud. He shaves daily, even in wintertime, and you will never see him wearing ragged boots held together with cheap glue, as his peers do. Even when he gets up at night to piss, the colonel puts on his belt before leaving his tent. Pazhari, people say, will never be caught with his trousers down.
In addition to his impressive stature, distinctive features and a small scar above his top lip, Pazhari is distinguished by a rare quality of holding sway over both men and women. A trivial comment of his at a staff meeting can make officers unsure whether it has annoyed them or filled them with love, if not to say passion, for him. And since passion between men is tenfold more inspiring than its trivial alternative, men can interact with Pazhari only if they love him unconditionally or are made nauseous by his presence.
The nauseated among them face a dilemma. If only they could point their finger at a fault in Pazhari’s conduct they would at least feel that their attitude was justified. But the colonel’s behaviour is impeccable. He could easily follow Mishenkov’s example, leave his own deputy in charge and go off to dine with government officials in the city. Such a handover of authority could go on for ever, ending with a humble private as commander-in-chief. But Pazhari prefers the routine of life at the barracks to sensual delights and political intrigues. He likes chatting with new recruits, crawling onto an empty cot in a tent for a quick nap, running a kitchen inspection once a week and smoking with his officers. If something escapes Pazhari’s attention it means that Pazhari let it escape on purpose, because it gives him peace of mind to know that there are some things he does not need to know. The colonel has come to learn that every soldier breaks at least one rule a day. To his mind, it is prefer-able that such transgressions should pertain to opium, morphine and mead rather than weapon smuggling or – God forbid – espionage.
One morning, a few days after the quartet’s arrival in camp, Col-onel Pazhari receives an urgent telegram from “the Department for Public Security and Order”. A nice name for the Okhrana’s rats, Pazhari thinks to himself. The letter is addressed to Lieutenant General Mishenkov, and the colonel wonders what it could be about. Looking for the signatory’s name at the bottom of the page, he is surprised to find it was sent on behalf of none other than the commander of the Okhrana’s north-western districts, Colonel Piotr Novak.
Although Pazhari served under Novak for no more than a fortnight, he knows his former commander better than the officers who served under the colonel for twenty years, by virtue of a random accident: Pazhari, a cavalry captain at the time, was there when a shell hit Novak’s horse during the battle on the Shipka Pass. Determined hussar that he was, Pazhari found himself among the first line of attack and witnessed the senior officer writhing in agony on the ground, dragging his leg along like a snake with a severed tail, with no sense of where he was going. Leaving a trail of blood in his wake, Novak leaned on a rifle in a desperate attempt to stand up and, contravening all orders, Pazhari jumped off his horse with the idea of dragging his commanding officer away from the line of fire, but took a punch to the face as soon as he tried it. “What do you think you’re doing, you fool?” Novak yelled. “Mount your horse and get back to the attack!” Pazhari obeyed the order, but he could not help staring at the gory, sooty, horrific pulp that had once been a leg. Blood was gushing from the shrapnel-torn knee, drenching the scorched flesh. As he grimaced, Pazhari realised that Novak had seen the terror in his face. Raising his eyes, the colonel seemed to plead with him: is it that bad? Is there really no hope? Pazhari did not have the gumption to lie to his commanding officer. He ignored Novak’s plea and returned to the mayhem.
Contrary to what people tend to think, our moral compass does not necessarily give us the ability to do the right thing in critical moments. If anything, the opposite is true. The inherently just are not virtuous, since they have never had a weakness or flaw they had to overcome. Alas, most people become a pale version of themselves and lose their wits altogether when evil makes an appearance. It is therefore a mistake to judge one’s morality in times of crisis. Most people, and Pazhari is no exception, become aware of their morals only in hindsight, once they have recognised their blunders and the irrevocable injustice they have unleashed. In the same way that a novice tailor makes inferior clothes before learning to produce flawless garments, people develop a moral sense through failure, flaw and sin.
For many years, Pazhari had replayed that scene at the battle on the Shipka Pass in his mind, and had come to realise that his role as a commander in the Czar’s army was to teach his men to accept reality as it was. Nothing more. If he could go back to that moment – and how often he imagined that he could, not a day passed without him wishing that he could – he would have turned to Novak’s pleading face and said sternly: “The leg is gone, deal with it.” And even if Novak would have expected him to offer consolation, Pazhari would have fulfilled a basic moral obligation: to see people as they are – in this case, with a mangled leg – and not as they ought to be.
Either way, even if Pazhari had had no idea who Piotr Novak was, a request from a district commander at the Department for Public Security and Order is no trivial matter. What is more, the telegram unequivocally demands to know whether four fugitive outlaws have been sighted in the camp, three men and a woman, members of an underground organisation of some sort, probably Jewish, who have murdered an innocent family and two agents in a cruel attack, and managed to escape on an old freight wagon headed for Minsk. Further below, a line written by a different hand reads: “Anywon hiding informashen abowt there identity or wherabowts wil be considerd ful akomplices and wil be I for conspirasy and eiding and abeting merder.”
Whoever wrote this line had to be a complete idiot. It couldn’t possibly be Novak’s doing, thinks Colonel Pazhari. But the smile that these spelling mistakes bring to the lips must not mask the seriousness of the words they express. Scaffolds can still be set up by fools who cannot spell their own name. Pazhari knows that it is customarily believed that the secret police follows laws of its own, but anyone who can think for himself knows that the secret police do not follow any laws whatsoever. If they decide tomorrow that David Pazhari has to go, then David Pazhari will be gone; and if they decide the next day that David Pazhari never existed, then he never existed.
Therefore, after reading the telegram, the colonel immediately orders his officers to find out if anyone knows anything about four fugitives in their midst. He tells the unit commanders to check their furthest outposts, and instructs the cavalry to send out horsemen to the nearby villages. Not even thirty minutes elapse before his question is answered in the negative, which makes him suspicious. First, such rumours usually stimulate the imaginations of bored people and prompt them to invent things they know nothing about. Give a muzhik a reason to report and he will come up with impossible tales that implicate four innocent people without an alibi, but in this case no-one saw anything. And second, how could they have already reached the furthest outposts and come back, if these outposts are half an hour’s ride in each direction?
Mind you, under normal circumstances Pazhari couldn’t care less if his soldiers have their secrets. If any other matter were at stake he would have left it at that. But the combination of the telegram’s exigency with the celerity of the responses makes him uneasy.
“Glazkov!” Pazhari says to one of his battalion commanders. “I want you in Nesvizh today. Starting tonight you will set up roadblocks near all the town’s gateways. Demidov! Mobilise towards Minsk, starting tomorrow. Zarobin! Mobilise south towards Baranavichy. Your soldiers don’t sleep a wink until we catch them. Is that clear?”
Pazhari has never seen his officers in such a state.
“To Nesvizh?” Glazkov mumbles.
“Where did you say we should set up roadblocks?” Demidov asks.
“Where should I go again?” Zarobin is confused.
“Are you still here?” Pazhari demands, now scrutinising maps of the area. “Go! Every minute counts!”
The colonel finds his officers’ hesitation amusing. Once they have left the tent, he peeks outside and sees them huddling together. They never question his orders normally, but now they are uneasy and dithering. Pazhari knows it will not take long for their secret to come to light.
Indeed, once the orders reach the ranks and the futility of pursuing their guests of more than a week makes itself evident, Zarobin returns to his commander with news: one of the sentries in his regiment reported that two of the four fugitives were spotted near the camp last night. Search parties have been dispatched to bring them to Pazhari.
“And what about the other two?” the colonel asks.
“Like I said, sir, the sentry only reported two people.”
We may surmise that the soldiers feel obliged only towards the Father and his niece. No-one cares about Adamsky, even though he was a decorated captain in his day, and clearly no-one has grown fond of the gluttonous, tone-deaf cantor.
If truth be told, some of the soldiers said that it was a cast-iron rule never to mess with the Department for Public Security and Order. If the Department demanded that four people should be handed over, they should hand over four people, even at the cost of giving up Breshov. However, others believed that giving up even one member of the Father’s entourage would be tantamount to sacrilege. Out of respect for the Czarist army and its troops it would be best not to dwell on the arguments that raged in the soldiers’ tents, which quickly turned into fist fights, bitter altercations, the settling of accounts and a few broken noses. Eventually, it was decided that they would give up two of the guests and save the other two, although it was unclear where the two now destined for arrest had gone. They were not in Zizek Breshov’s tent, and no-one knew where they had spent the week following their arrival.