I shook my head. “Nothing against your horses or your hussars, rotmistr, but I wonder why they suddenly decided to start transporting soldiers east? I thought you were on garrison duty?”
He confirmed with a nod and frowned. “I suppose freight trains would be useful for trading. It is just incidental that they used them for troops.”
“Your orders said nothing about any urgency of your journey to Turkestan then? Nothing about heightened preparedness for military action?”
He scowled. “Tell you what, son. If you’re so smart and well-connected, why don’t you join us — we are leaving tomorrow, and we can keep you company at least to Turkestan. If your friend shows up, that will be all for the good. If not, we can offer some protection. We can talk if you feel like it, too.”
“Why are you doing this for me?” I whispered, my eyes filming over and threatening to spill sudden, warm tears.
“Hussars stick together,” he said, smiling. “That’s why.”
The rotmistr (who I was by then suspecting of being my guardian angel in a hussar uniform) led me to the other side of the station, to another set of tracks. There was no platform, and the only train there was merely a few carriages long, the rest of it composed out of open carts covered with sailcloth, housing the impatient, snorting horses covered with felt and blankets to keep them warm against the Siberian winter. Through the walls made of thick wooden slats, light and resinous, I could see the horses’ breath and the small mincing steps they took in their narrow prisons, I could hear the muffled strikes of their shod hooves, iron against frozen straw, brittle as glass.
“Poor beasts,” one of the cornets (I think it was Volzhenko, younger and sadder than his doppelganger Petrovsky) said, tracing my gaze. “They want to be out of those tiny stables on wheels so bad. They want to run and to feel the dry grass against their flanks, not this cursed cold… ” He noticed the curious stare of the other cornet and let his voice trail off, to my chagrin.
I, of course, wanted to hear more — I was always intrigued by how many of my compatriots had such poetic and earnest souls below their jaded exteriors, an almost embarrassing sincerity and blazing conviction one found in certain kinds of drunks.
The rotmistr slapped my shoulder to gain my attention and almost sent me tumbling down on my hands and knees; instead, I managed an awkward hop, stepped too heavily on my injured foot, gave a loud hiss between my teeth but recovered. We stood before one of the carriages of the hussars’ train, and the rotmistr helped me climb its wrought iron ladder-steps, covered with festoons of transparent ice.
Inside, the carriage did not have compartments but merely rows of wooden benches, sparsely populated by soldiers who smoked, played cards, talked loudly, dissected pickled herrings on greasy newspapers, and washed their foot wraps in buckets of murky water. It smelled of stale sweat and mold, and I feared I would not last a day in this place — I would probably shout at someone or hit them with a wet wrap in the face or choke them by shoving a deck of card down their throat. I laughed then, and the rotmistr gave me a concerned look. “You don’t look well, poruchik,” he said. “Let’s show you to the doctor right away.”
The doctor was found in the end of the carriage, where he drank and played cards with a few soldiers. He was a small, balding man with a sharp goatee who seemed genuinely sorry to leave the game in favor of taking a look at some stranger his rotmistr had dragged in.
I sat on an empty bench and the doctor leaned in, as the rotmistr and his cornets watched on. Of course, I refused a too-close examination, and reassured him that taking a look at my ankle would be sufficient. My ankle and leg were so swollen he had to cut open the upper portion of my boot in order to remove it. I peeked at my ankle and felt immediately nauseated — it was red and black and purple, certainly not the color flesh was supposed to be.
“It’s a bad sprain,” the doctor reassured me after he contented himself with what felt like many interminable hours of poking, prodding, and twisting of the tender flesh. “It’ll heal — just stay off it, keep some ice on it, keep your boot off and your leg elevated — you don’t want blood pooling in there. You do seem to have a fever, but I suspect that it is unrelated.”
The moment the word “fever” touched my tympanic membranes, the carriage around me tilted and swam, as if the doctor’s words allowed something I had kept away from my consciousness with a sheer act of will to coalesce and take shape, to fill my ears with sticky cotton so that the din of the carriage became subdued and remote as the tide of my own blood pounded at my ears like waves of the Pacific, toward which I had been moving so slowly, so unavoidably. I leaned into the back of the bench, and felt cold sweat slithering under my uniform. The sensation of these chill, somehow greasy drops, made me want to cry about everything I had lost that day — Jack, the documents he carried, my letter, Kuan Yu and Liu Zhi, my ankle… that would be regained, of course, but still. Instead of crying, I eased into the hard wooden bench and hugged my satchel to my chest, terrified of losing anything else. I heard the rotmistr’s soft voice ordering the cornets around, and after a short pause there was a scratchy woolen blanket over me and a pillow that smelled like wet feathers thrust under my head. Large calloused hands eased me into the corner so my head rested against the pillow wedged between my cheek and the wall of the train, by the window. I felt the light diminish outside, and then it was night. The darkness brought an intensified fever and wild imaginings — there were stars exploding across my closed eyelids and I heard voices — not the hussars in the carriage but menacing voices that whispered on the very edge of my hearing in a language I could not understand but sounded unmistakably hostile. It felt as if I strained just a bit more I would understand their vague threats, but I avoided it. I dreamt and hallucinated and was buoyed by the waves of fever, until the morning came and there was weakness and drenching sweat, and a slow rumble of the moving wheels.
I slept and dreamt, and woke up to a steaming glass of tea, my fingers slipping on its sides. I drank my tea and slept again. Then I woke again and had someone help me walk to the end of the carriage, where the tiny privy (much smellier and considerably less comfortable than the one in the couchette carriage of the Trans-Siberian train) offered necessary relief. Three days had passed, and we arrived at Novonikolaevsk before I was ever cognizant enough to realize that without thinking of it much, I had left Jack behind and it was too late now to go back.
In my defense, the fever I contracted in Yekaterinburg had bound me in a delirious dream from the moment I snuggled into the blanket provided by the very thoughtful rotmistr. The rattling of wheels had separated from its meaning, from signaling movement east, and only resonated in my ears as mindless percussion, as metronome beats.
The sleep was constant and yet uneven — I was often startled from it by laughter and voices, but even those remained meaningless, inconsequential, as if mere music and not the indication of a train full of hussars. Even the neighing of the caged horses in their wooden prison right behind my carriage did not jolt me to reality. One night I thought I heard thunder but then heard the rotmistr and others talking about horses’ hooves shattering a slatted wall and two of them jumping off, breaking their legs as the train kept speeding along. I did not know whether the story was just a dream or a real memory.
In the end, I woke up three days later, when the train had stopped by a snow-covered platform, everything around us pristine and white, and for a moment I thought I was still dreaming, of some quintessentially Russian heaven. My face pressed against the window felt cold and numb — I must have been sitting like that for a while, but did not realize it until just now. The cessation of movement and sound must’ve jolted me to awareness.