Kuan Yu and Liu Zhi made fast friends with the hussars. Here, without the compartments, we all shared the same living space, and it felt like a gypsy encampment where people moved from bench to bench, forming temporary alliances and knots of conversations and laughter and card games. We consumed ridiculous amounts of pickled herring and pot stickers and wine; the rotmistr made sure that we were well stocked with food and drink, since the military trains did not bother with a restaurant carriage — or many other amenities. Besides the engineer and the freedmen feeding coal to the insatiable maw of the locomotive, coal that powered its terrible blazing heart, it was just the hussars, two Chinese fur traders, and I.
Kuan Yu and Liu Zhi had fulfilled the requirements of their professed occupation, and bought a goodly portion of Trubkozub’s inventory, as well as bartered several bolts of white and blue silk. I had made a mental note not to leave China before acquiring several miles worth of this smooth, shimmering material in pale blue for my mother, and a few bolts of black for Eugenia. Both would surely enjoy it.
Krasnoyarsk used to be a frontier town, Cornet Volzhenko who seemed to consider himself my friend now, told me. It was built to guard the eastern reaches of the empire back in the seventeenth century, and now it had retained some of its old forts. “All wood,” Volzhenko said as he sipped wine from his tin mug, his legs stretched across the aisle between our benches, and his large boots propped comfortably next to me. “Nothing really modern there. There’s a garrison though, all Cossacks, I think.”
“That’s good,” I said. “What are they doing there?”
Volzhenko shrugged. “Guarding the border, I suppose.”
“They are not near the border.”
“Somewhat near.”
“Not near enough to guard it.”
Volzhenko smiled. I noticed he looked particularly young when he grinned like that — lopsided, showing a chipped canine tooth on the left side of his mouth, his faintly freckled nose wrinkling. I frowned, thinking that if there was to be a war, Volzhenko would certainly be sent to fight and likely to die. Eugenia’s words floated back in my memory — her lamentations for her brother who was killed in the previous war, the helpless cry of those who were left alive and had to carry the burden of remembering the dead. “I’m sure if there’s a war with China, the Krasnoyarsk garrison will be there in spades. When we get there, I’ll take you to one of the Buryat teahouses — I swear, their tea is the strangest thing I had ever seen. They make it with lard.”
“That doesn’t sound like something I would want to try.”
Volzhenko laughed, slapped his knee for emphasis. “You have to. For the experience, see? It’s not as awful as it sounds.”
“Right.”
“Well, it is pretty awful,” Volzhenko admitted. “But you have to have experiences like this, you know.” He removed his feet from my bench and leaned forward, elbows in his knees. “This is one thing I believe. You know how Father in church, how he always tells you about your soul, and how he’s always yapping about soul this and soul that?”
I nodded. “I know, although I haven’t been to church in a while.”
“No matter, you remember. And how they always make it sound like your soul is something you always have, how you get it when you’re still in your mother’s belly and have it till you die, and how it is always the same and unchanged?”
“That’s the long and the short of it, yes.”
“But I think they are wrong, and I don’t care if they say it’s heretical and such. I think that we are born only with a capacity for the soul, and the things we experience and learn and think about, this is what makes the soul up — the layers of everything. I heard there was that Father, a priest in Moscow who wanted to take a picture of God, so he bought this contraption for taking daguerreotypes, and took pictures of everything — his room, trees, streets, birds, just everything around him. And he took them all on the same plate, because he hoped that all these images one on top of each other, all of them translucent, would make a portrait of God.”
“Did it work?”
He laughed and ruffled his hair, his hand traveling a familiar path from the back of his neck to his forehead. “I don’t know; I doubt it. But I think it works with us — we, people, we are just cameras, and every image, everything we see and experience becomes us, becomes our soul, all of them layered and translucent… ” His voice trailed off as his gaze grew remote, directed at something far away, beyond the walls of the train carriage.
“That’s beautiful,” I whispered, entranced by the delicate elegance of his heresy. “I didn’t realize you were a philosopher.”
“I took a course at the seminary in Moscow,” he said. “The rotmistr, bless him, persuaded me when I was still young enough to listen that one didn’t have to serve God by repeating the most trivial babblings of his most unimaginative servants.” Like the rotmistr, Volzhenko possessed the valuable gift of changing his diction to suit circumstance. I was starting to feel I was in a den of shape-shifters of a most peculiar kind — those who changed from simple and uneducated bumpkins to sophisticated gentlemen in a wink of an eye.
“It’s hard to imagine you a priest,” I said.
He nodded. “I was going to join the black clergy too — to become a monk. White, the parish priests, are too well fed and too content with their wives and children and being pillars of the community. The monks at least have a greater purpose than keeping their belly full. Monks… one could become an archimandrite. But yes, higher purpose is what I wanted.”
“None higher that the cavalry,” I said.
“You said a mouthful there, Menshov. Maybe you’re not as dumb as you look.”
“Look who’s talking.”
He laughed. “Fair enough. What I learned in the seminary — that was all nothing. I really started to develop true understanding when I started listening to the rotmistr.”
“I know. He is your teacher, prophet, and God.”
Volzhenko did not laugh but grew serious instead. “You need to talk to him more, maybe you’ll understand what a great man he is.”
The rotmistr towered two benches over, so we took our wine and migrated to sit next to him, disrupting his whispered and, by all appearances, emotional discussion with Petrovsky. If the rotmistr was indeed a messiah, he couldn’t have wished for more dedicated disciples than his cornets.
“Sit with us, you two,” he addressed us when we approached. “I was just telling the dolt here why I joined the military.”
“The Napoleonic war?” I guessed. “Lost your father in it?”
“This, my young poruchik, is all coincidental although not wrong,” he replied. “But the real reason is that unless you die with a weapon in your hand — and what is a better way to ensure such manner of death than joining the military? — you cannot reach Valhalla.”
“Valhalla,” I repeated. The rotmistr appeared to be one of those rare individuals who managed to combine a perfectly traditional upbringing with unexpected paganism of the school that greatly exaggerated the nobility and acumen of our Scandinavian neighbors, but I was at least willing to give the rotmistr a chance to talk about his unorthodoxies, since we had a few hours until arrival to Krasnoyarsk.
“Valhalla,” the rotmistr said and sobered up visibly. “Not because of what you think, Menshov — not just weapons or the flying wenches… whatever they are called.”
“Valkyrie,” Petrovsky offered in a reverential tone, his eyes glistening. I guessed that he harbored some ideas of his own as well.