‘Ask the authorities for permission to take the children’s coffins away with you – they will grant it.’
‘No, I can’t do that, I don’t want to!’ said Albina.
‘You must ask them. Everything depends on it. We shall not take the coffins, but we shall make a large box for them and into that box we shall put Josif.’
For a moment Albina wanted to reject this suggestion, so painful was it for her to associate any such deception with the memory of her children, but when Migurski cheerfully approved the project, she agreed.
The final version of the plan was thus as follows: Migurski would do everything to convince the authorities that he had been drowned. As soon as his death had been officially recognized she would apply for permission, following the death of her husband, to return to her native land, taking with her the mortal remains of her children. Once the permission had been granted everything would be done to give the impression that the graves had been opened and the coffins taken out, but the coffins would remain where they were and instead of the coffins it would be Migurski who would take their place in the specially constructed box. The box would be loaded on to the tarantass and so they would reach Saratov. At Saratov they would transfer to the boat. In the boat Juzio would emerge and they would sail down to the Caspian Sea. And there Persia or Turkey awaited them – and freedom.
IX
First of all the Migurskis purchased a tarantass on the pretext that Ludwika would soon be leaving to return to her homeland. Then began the construction of the box to allow Migurski to lie in it, if only in a contorted position, without suffocating, to emerge quickly and unobtrusively, and to crawl back into it when necessary. The designing and fitting out of the box was the work of all three of them together – Albina, Rosolowski, and Migurski himself. Rosolowski’s help was particularly vital, since he was an accomplished carpenter. They made the box to be fixed against the front-to-back struts at the rear of the coach body and flush with it, and the wall of the box which lay against the bodywork could be slid out, allowing a person to lie partly in the box and partly in the bottom of the tarantass. In addition airholes were bored in the box, and the top and sides were to be covered with bast matting and tied up with cords. It was possible to get in and out of the box by way of the tarantass, which was fitted with a seat.
When tarantass and box were ready, and when her husband had yet to make his disappearance, Albina began to prepare the authorities by going to the Colonel and telling him that her husband had fallen into a state of melancholia and was threatening to kill himself, and that she feared for his life and begged that he might be released before it was too late. Her acting ability stood her in good stead. The fear and anxiety she expressed for her husband appeared so natural that the Colonel was touched and promised to do all he could. After that Migurski composed the letter which was to be discovered in the cuff of his overcoat left lying on the river bank, and on the evening they had chosen he went down to the Ural, waited until it was dark, laid the clothes and the coat containing the letter on the bank, and returned home. They had prepared him a hiding-place in the loft, secured by a padlock. That night Albina sent word to the Colonel by Ludwika to say that her husband had left the house some twenty hours earlier and had not returned. Next morning her husband’s letter was brought to her, and she, with every appearance of deep despair, went off weeping to show it to the Colonel.
A week later Albina submitted her request to be allowed to leave for her own land. The grief displayed by Madame Migurski affected everyone who saw her: all were filled with pity for this unfortunate wife and mother. When permission had been granted for her departure, she made a second request – that she might be allowed to exhume the bodies of her children and take them with her.
The military authorities were astonished at such a display of sentimentality, but agreed to this as well.
On the evening of the day after this permission had been given, Rosolowski, Albina and Ludwika drove in a hired cart, containing the box, to the cemetery where the children were buried. Albina fell to her knees before the grave, said a prayer, then quickly got up, and turning to Rosolowski said:
‘Do what must be done, but I cannot have any part in it,’ and went off by herself.
Rosolowski and Ludwika moved the gravestone aside and turned over the whole of the top surface of the plot with a shovel so that the grave looked as though it had been opened. When all this was done they called to Albina and returned home taking the box, filled with earth.
The day fixed for their departure came at last. Rosolowski was rejoicing at the success of the enterprise which seemed almost complete, Ludwika had baked biscuits and pies for the journey, and repeating her favourite turn of phrase, ‘jak mame kocham,’8 said that her heart was bursting with fear and joy at the same time. Migurski was filled with joy, both by his release from the loft where he had spent more than a month, and still more by the renewed vitality and joie de vivre of Albina. She seemed to have forgotten all her former grief and the dangers, and as she might have done in her girlhood, ran to see him in the loft, radiating rapture and delight.
At three in the morning their Cossack escort arrived, bringing with him the coachman and a team of three horses. Albina, Ludwika and the little dog took their seats on the cushions of the tarantass which were covered with matting. The Cossack and the driver got up on the box, and Migurski, wearing peasant clothes, was lying in the body of the tarantass.
They were soon out of the town, and the team of good horses pulled the tarantass along the beaten roadway, smooth as stone, through the endless unploughed steppe overgrown with the last season’s silvery feather-grass.
X
Albina’s heart had almost stopped beating from hope and delight. Wishing to share her feelings with someone else, she now and then, almost smiling, made a sign with her head to Ludwika, indicating now the broad back of the Cossack seated on the box, now the bottom of the tarantass. Ludwika stared motionlessly ahead with a meaningful expression, only slightly pursing her lips. The day was bright. On all sides stretched the limitless deserted steppe and the silvery feathergrass shining in the slanting rays of the morning sun. Occasionally, first on one side, then on the other side of the hard road on which the rapid, unshod hooves of the Bashkir horses rang out as if on asphalt, the little earth-covered mounds made by gophers came into view; one of the little creatures would be sitting up on sentry duty, and anticipating danger would give a piercing whistle and disappear into the burrow beneath. On rare occasions they met with passers-by: a string of Cossack carts full of wheat, or some Bashkirs on horseback with whom their Cossack exchanged animated remarks in the Tatar tongue. At all the posting stations the horses were fresh and well-fed, and the half-roubles provided by Albina for vodka ensured that the drivers drove the horses, as they put it, like Feldjägers,9 galloping all the way.