In the summer she would go to her children’s grave and sit there, lacerating her heart with memories of what had been and of what might have been. She was particularly tormented by the thought that her children would still have been alive, had they all been living in a town where medical aid was to be had. ‘Why? What for?’ she thought. ‘And Juzio and I, we want nothing from anybody, except for him to be able to live in the way he was born to live, as his grandparents and his forefathers lived, and all I want is to live with him and to love him, and to love my little ones and to bring them up.
‘Yet suddenly they start tormenting him, and send him into exile, and they take away from me what is dearer to me than the whole world. Why? What for?’ – she hurled this question at men and at God. And she could not conceive of the possibility of any kind of answer. Yet without an answer there was no life for her. And so her life came to a standstill. This wretched life of banishment, which she had previously managed to beautify by her feminine good taste and elegance, now became intolerable not only to her, but to Migurski, who suffered both on her account and because he did not know how to help her.
VII
At this most terrible time for the Migurskis there appeared in Uralsk a Pole by the name of Rosolowski who had been involved in a grandiose plan for a rebellion and escape, drawn up at that time in Siberia by the exiled Catholic priest Sirocynsky.
Rosolowksi, like Migurski and thousands of others condemned to Siberian exile for having desired to live in the manner to which they were born, that is as Poles, had got involved in this cause and had been flogged with birch rods and assigned to serve as a soldier in the same battalion as Migurski. Rosolowksi, a former mathematics teacher, was a long, thin stooping man with sunken cheeks and a furrowed brow.
So it was that on the very first evening of his time in Uralsk Rosolowski, as he sat drinking tea in the Migurskis’ quarters, inevitably began in his slow, calm bass voice to recount the circumstances which had led to his suffering so cruelly. It appeared that Sirocynsky had been organizing a secret society with members all over Siberia whose aim was to incite a mutiny among the soldiers and convicts with the help of the Poles enlisted in the Cossack and line regiments, to rouse the deported settlers to revolt, seize the artillery at Omsk and set everyone free.
‘But would that really have been possible?’ enquired Migurski.
‘Quite possible, everything had been prepared,’ said Rosolowski frowning gloomily, and slowly and calmly he proceeded to tell them all about the plan of liberation and the measures which had been taken to assure the success of the enterprise and, in case it should fail, to ensure the safety of the conspirators. Their success would have been certain, but for the treachery of two villains. According to Rosolowski, Sirocynsky had been a man of genius and of great spiritual power, and his death too had been that of a hero and a martyr. And Rosolowski began in his calm, deep, measured voice to recount the details of the execution at which, by the order of the authorities, he and all the others found guilty in the case were compelled to be present.
‘Two battalions of soldiers stood in two ranks forming a long corridor, each man holding a pliant rod of such a thickness, defined by the Emperor himself, that no more than three of them could be inserted into a rifle muzzle. The first man to be brought out was Dr Szakalski. Two soldiers led him along and the men with the rods lashed him on his exposed back as he came level with them. I was only able to see what was happening when he came near to the spot where I was standing. At first I could hear only the beating of the drum, but then, when the swish of the rods and sound of the blows falling on his body began to be audible, I knew he was approaching. And I could see that the soldiers were pulling him along on their rifles, and so he came, shuddering and turning his head first to one side, then to the other. And once, as he was being led past us, I heard the Russian doctor telling the soldiers, “Don’t hit him too hard, have pity on him.” But they went on beating him just the same: when they led him past us for the second time he was no longer able to walk unaided, they had to drag him. His back was dreadful to behold. I screwed up my eyes. He collapsed, and they carried him away. Then a second man was brought out. Then a third, and a fourth. All of them eventually fell down and were carried away – some looked as if they were dead, others just about alive, and we all had to stand there and watch. It went on for six hours – from morning until two in the afternoon. Last of all they brought out Sirocynsky himself. It was a long time since I had seen him and I would not have recognized him, so much older did he look. His clean-shaven face was full of wrinkles, and a pale greenish colour. His body where it was uncovered was thin and yellow and his ribs stuck out above his contracted stomach. He moved along as all the others had done, shuddering at each stroke and jerking his head, but he did not groan and kept repeating a prayer in a loud voice: ‘Miserere mei Deus secundum magnam misericordiam tuam.’7
‘I myself could hear it,’ said Rosolowski rapidly in a strangled voice, and he shut his mouth and breathed heavily through his nose.
Ludwika, sitting by the window, was sobbing and had covered her face with her shawl.
‘And you had to describe it to us! They are beasts, nothing but savage beasts!’ cried Migurski, and throwing down his pipe he jumped up from his chair and hurried out into the unlit bedroom. Albina sat there as if turned to stone, gazing into the dark corner of the room.
VIII
The following day Migurski, on his way home from a lesson, was surprised to see his wife hurrying to meet him with light steps and a radiant face. When they got home she took him into their bedroom.
‘Juzio, listen to me.’
‘Listen? What do you mean?’
‘I have been thinking all night about what Rosolowksi was telling us. And I have decided: I cannot go on living like this, in this place. I cannot. I may die, but I am not going to stay here.’
‘But what can we possibly do?’
‘Escape.’
‘Escape? How?’
‘I’ve thought it all through. Listen,’ – and she told him the plan she had worked out during the night. Her plan was this: he, Migurski, would leave the house in the evening and leave his greatcoat on the bank of the Ural, and beside it a letter saying that he was going to take his own life. They would think he had drowned. They would hunt for his body and send in a report of what had occurred. Meanwhile he would be hiding – she would hide him so that he could not be found. They could go on like that for a month at least. And when all the fuss had died down, they would run away.
Migurski’s first reaction was that her scheme was impracticable, but by the end of the day her passionate confidence in it had convinced him, and he began to be of the same mind. Apart from that, he was inclined to agree with her, for the very reason that the punishment for an attempted escape, the same punishment Rosolowski had described to them, would fall on him, Migurski, but if they succeeded she would be set free, and he saw that since the death of the two children life here had been bitterly hard for her.
Rosolowski and Ludwika were let into the scheme, and after lengthy discussions, modifications and adjustments the plan was complete. To begin with they arranged that Migurski, once he had been presumed drowned, should run away alone on foot. Albina would then take the carriage and meet him at a prearranged place. This was the first plan. But later, when Rosolowski had told them of all the unsuccessful escape attempts which had been made in Siberia over the past five years (during which only one fortunate man had escaped to safety), Albina put forward a different plan – namely, that Juzio should be hidden in the carriage and travel with her and Ludwika to Saratov. At Saratov he would change his clothes and walk downstream along the bank of the Volga to an agreed spot where he would board a boat which she would have hired in Saratov and which would take the three of them down the Volga as far as Astrakhan and then across the Caspian Sea to Persia. This plan was approved by them all, as well as by its principal architect Rosolowski, but they were faced with the difficulty of fitting the carriage with a hiding-place big enough to take a man without attracting the attention of the authorities. And when Albina, having paid a visit to the children’s grave, told Rosolowski that she felt bad about leaving her children’s remains in an alien land, he thought for a moment, then said: