Berezovo: A Revolutionary Russian Epic

“Well, it’s the drink, mainly. I mean, you’ve got to drink up there, you’ll find that out. But they get desperate on it. They’ll do anything to get a bottle. They’ll kill you for your boots if you gave them a chance. Especially yours.”

Trotsky smiled as his feet moved guiltily beneath the thick horsehair rug.

“Whassat?” snarled the driver suddenly as he sent the whip lashing out across the straining backs of the team.

“I was just telling our young friend here to watch out for the Ostyak women.”

“Pah! Ostyaks!” sniffed the driver disdainfully. “No better than animals, most of them. Not fit for the likes of you, poet.”

“I’m not a poet,” repeated Trotsky.

Ignoring him, the driver reached down again and grasped the neck of the stone bottle. This time, as he drank, two small rivulets of vodka flowed down either side of his bearded lower jaw and he quickly wiped the long furry arm of his sleeve across his mouth before the liquor had time to freeze.

“Don’t want to get mixed up with them,” he warned. “Knew a bloke once, an exile he was just like you, who had one right out in the middle of the Taiga. There were both drunk, see, and afterwards, of course, he was tired and she was tired so they both fell fast asleep, like you do. And when they woke up, they found they were both frozen together. Honest to God, it’s true! Frozen like a fucking fish in a pond, it was. Anyway, who should come along but her husband. Well, of course, at first he was none too pleased, though God knows he would probably have sold her for a couple of bottles, like all Ostyaks. In the end, the exile promises the husband something… gold or something, I forget. So he does the decent thing.”

“Which was?” asked Trotsky.

“He builds a fire and boils up some water from the snow. And when the water was good and scolding hot, he pours it all over the exile’s balls and what-not until it melted the ice.”

Trotsky winced.

“That was good of him.”

“Yeah, well,” admitted the driver reluctantly. “Some of them aren’t all bad, I suppose.”

“Sometimes,” broke in the soldier, “when our boys get taken short on patrol and have to have a piss, they get frostbite. We always pour vodka on it. Works every time.”

“Oh yes,” agreed the driver, “I’ve done that too. But you would never get an Ostyak to do that. Waste of good booze, that would be. Specially,” he added with a crooked grin, “on someone who’s just been poking your wife.”

The soldier laughed and even Trotsky found himself smiling at the driver’s words.

“I suppose you see quite a lot of funny sights in your line,” said the driver as he passed the bottle to the guard. “Were you out East?”

“Yes and glad to be back, I can tell you,” the guard replied.

“What are they like then? The Eastern women. I mean, are they different or what?”

Grinning, the soldier drank deeply.

“Lovely things, they are,” he said with a smack of his lips. “Their men are undersized; can’t be compared to real men. But the women are beautiful. White and plump… you know?”

“Well then,” prompted the driver. “Did our fellows… you know… take up with the Chinese girls?”

“No,” the soldier told him regretfully. “Not allowed to, see? First, they take the Chinese women away, then they let the troops in. Still, some of our crowd caught a Chink girl in a maize field and had a go. And one of them left his cap there.”

He took another swig and passed the bottle to Trotsky.

“So the Chinky headman,” he continued, “brings the cap along and shows it to our officer. He lines up the whole camp and asks: ‘Whose cap?’”

Putting his pipe back in his mouth, he puffed thoughtfully on it.

“What happened, then?” asked the driver

The pipe had gone out. Only after he had rummaged in his coat pocket and found his matches did he continue.

“Nobody makes a sound. Better to lose your cap than get into that sort of trouble, see? In the end it all came to nothing. But the Chinese women are lovely.”

Still puffing on his pipe, the soldier fell silent, his gaze far away as he thought over the incident.

Trotsky held the stone bottle upright on his lap and stared sourly out of the sleigh. The forest was closer now and he could make out the first few trees that stood out from the main body of the forest, as if they had taken a few steps forward to meet them. Without bothering to wipe the top of the bottle, he lifted it and drank. The stone bottle felt appreciably lighter than it had done before. Suddenly, he realized that he was a little drunk. He grunted in surprise to himself, as if the possibility had not previously occurred to him, and, out of a mixture of bravado and self-pity, took another slug of the noxious spirit. He was twenty-six years old, he thought, and on his way to the Arctic Circle guarded by an armed rapist and a pony molester.