Dmitri and the Milk-Drinkers Read online

  It had to be, though, thought Dmitri. The infirmary! That’s where she had been all the time. She must have been sent there the moment she had arrived in Tiumen. But why?

  ‘You’re sure she wasn’t a patient?’

  The doctor hesitated.

  ‘She could have been convalescing, I suppose.’

  That might be it. The rigours of the journey … a delicate girl … exposure to God knows what. All the same, her name – or the name of Shumin – had not appeared on any of the sick lists. A simple mistake, perhaps? Clerical error – another one? Even Dmitri, though, was beginning to lose his faith in the infinite capacity of the Russian bureaucratic machine to make mistakes. No, the doctor was probably right. She was not there as a patient.

  But even if she was there in some other capacity, as an orderly, perhaps, as Konstantin had suggested, her name ought to have appeared somewhere. She couldn’t have simply turned up at the infirmary; someone must have sent her. The prison authorities must have known; and if they had known, why were they keeping it hidden?

  Released from his cell the next morning, Dmitri was glad to go out into the yard and breathe air. By the time the politicals were allowed downstairs, the yard was already full of grey coats and squashed hats, and heavy with the sound of chains chinking.

  Methodosius came across towards him.

  ‘A message for you,’ he said, ‘from the girls. They want you to go and see them.’

  ‘In the same way?’

  ‘Why not?’

  Methodosius was no longer in the fatigues party, but that, he assured Dmitri, presented no problem. He would exchange with someone. And, if one, why not two?’

  ‘It happens all the time,’ he said. ‘A couple of cigarettes and it’s done. And another couple and the guards don’t mind.’

  It was not as easy, however, to arrange a visit to the infirmary.

  ‘They’ve got their own orderlies. And since the infirmary is in a block of its own, and further out, they look at you pretty carefully. It’s not something I could fix.’

  Pressed, however, he said that it might be something that somebody else could fix and that he would see.

  Dmitri had to be content with that. For the moment, he turned his mind to other things: the shit-buckets, for instance.

  They staggered out with them the next morning. Even empty, they were heavy enough for Dmitri and he was not looking forward to the return. Across the road they went, and through the gate; and then, after a few minutes, into the barracks where he was greeted enthusiastically by the women.

  ‘Isn’t he lovely?’

  ‘It suits you, darling!’

  ‘This way, lovey!’

  Methodosius had business to attend to at the other end of the hut.

  ‘So?’ said Dmitri, sitting down on the edge of the sleeping platform while the women clustered around him.

  ‘That separate party,’ they said, ‘we know where it went.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘The infirmary.’

  ‘Ah!’

  ‘And Anya went with them. That’s definite. We’ve spoken with somebody who saw her.’

  ‘You don’t know why she was sent to the infirmary?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She wasn’t sick or anything?’

  ‘She didn’t look sick,’ said the woman who had seen her at the gate, ‘not when I saw her.’

  ‘I thought maybe the journey …’

  The women laughed.

  ‘Isn’t he sweet?’

  ‘They’d have us all in the infirmary, love, if they took that into account!’

  ‘She had it easy,’ said someone. ‘I saw her riding with the Milk-Drinkers.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘With the Milk-Drinkers, love. They often ride on the carts with the sick.’

  ‘That’s because they’re looking after them,’ someone explained.

  ‘They’re like that.’

  ‘Was she looking after the sick, too?’

  That would make sense of the move to the infirmary.

  The women looked at each other.

  ‘She wasn’t on the carts at the start,’ said someone, ‘because she was with us.’

  ‘Ah, yes. But then we got separated. She went off because of that man. I don’t think I saw her after that. When was it that you saw her, Liza?’

  ‘Nearly the last day. We came up with a lot of carts and she was in one of them.’

  ‘Perhaps she’d got mixed up with a hospital convoy in between.’

  ‘Did no one else see her?’

  The women shook their heads.

  ‘We were further back,’ they said. ‘It was a long convoy. Several miles.’

  ‘What about the Milk-Drinkers? Are any of them here?’

  ‘Not in this hut. Maybe in one of the other ones.’

  ‘I’ll go and look, if you like,’ offered one of the women.

  But Methodosius was already returning from his labours.

  ‘See what you can find out,’ said Dmitri. ‘I’ll try and come again.’

  ‘Well, girls,’ said Methodosius. ‘Satisfied?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that.’

  ‘Well, maybe you’re too many for him. Maybe he needs some help.’

  ‘Oh, he’s not interested in us. His heart’s on someone else.’

  ‘A real Russian beauty!’

  The guard opened the door. Dmitri and Methodosius went to the bucket and tried to shake it loose. Some of the contents spilled over again and he gagged at the stench.

  ‘Goodbye, girls,’ said Methodosius. ‘See you again!’

  ‘You can bring him again, too. We haven’t given up hope.’

  As they were going out of the gate, Dmitri stumbled. The guard pushed him roughly back into line. In doing so, he dislodged Dmitri’s convict cap, which was several sizes too large for him, anyhow. Dmitri bent quickly to pick it up. Not quickly enough. The guard caught a glimpse of his face and froze.

  ‘Here!’ he said. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Methodosius. ‘You’ve seen nothing. Look, we’ll make it all right for you.’

  But once inside the gate of the main prison, the guard made them stop. He called into the guard house and guards came running out.

  ‘Just look at this!’

  He made Dmitri take his cap off.

  ‘Bloody hell! Carrying the shit-buckets!’

  One of the guards went off and returned with the senior official Dmitri knew. He took one look at Dmitri and went pink.

  ‘Dmitri Alexandrovich!’

  ‘All right, all right!’ said Dmitri.

  ‘With the buckets!’

  ‘How else?’ said Dmitri.

  The man swallowed.

  ‘I’m afraid, sir, I shall have to report this.’

  ‘Do so,’ said Dmitri.

  ‘I must ask you to come with me.’

  It became obvious that he was being taken to the Governor.

  ‘Shall I change first?’

  ‘No, sir,’ said the official distantly. ‘He must see you as you are.’

  ‘I thought the smell – ’

  But it was no good. He was paraded before the Governor.

  ‘Dmitri Alexandrovich!’

  ‘Since you will not allow me to perform my duties in ordinary ways,’ said Dmitri, ‘I have to perform them in other ways.’

  ‘But this – this, sir, is deception!’

  ‘Necessary deception.’

  Dmitri, in the wrong and therefore belligerent, wondered for a moment whether to point out that his was not the only deception. Why had the Governor concealed from him that Anna Semeonova was in the infirmary?

  ‘Sir,’ spluttered the Governor, ‘you have not behaved like a gentleman!’

  8

  The following morning, Dmitri was summoned to the Governor again.

  ‘I must ask you to leave.’

  ‘I have not completed my inquiries yet,’ said Dmitri.

  ‘Your pr
esence has become unwelcome.’

  ‘I am sure of that,’ said Dmitri. ‘It is not a great pleasure to me either. Nevertheless, I shall stay until I have completed my inquiries.’

  ‘I am afraid you do not have the choice.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Dmitri. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Siberia is a Restricted Area. You may not enter it, travel in it, or reside in it without special permission.’

  ‘Which I have.’

  ‘And which can be revoked at any time. I propose to revoke it.’

  Dmitri considered.

  ‘Is that wise?’

  The Governor sat back in surprise.

  ‘Oh, very wise, I would have said.’

  ‘In view of the fact that when I get back to Kursk I shall report that you have obstructed my inquiries.’

  ‘I do not think that will get you far.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think I will come into it. The girl’s family – a well-connected family, may I say – ’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said the Governor: ‘Dolgorukov. Well, let me tell you, I’ve had inquiries made, and Dolgorukov knows nothing about it.’

  ‘Yet,’ granted Dmitri. ‘The family is waiting for my return. They are expecting me to come back with their daughter. When I don’t, I think you can expect quite a lot of people to hear about it, including Prince Dolgorukov. The affair has, after all, aroused widespread interest, The daughter of a well-to-do family, deported to Siberia through bureaucratic incompetence, lost, somehow, at Siberia’s leading prison – ’

  ‘There is no evidence’, said the Governor, stung, ‘of the girl’s ever having been here!’

  ‘Oh, yes, there is,’ said Dmitri. ‘Oh, yes, there is!’

  The Governor looked at him quickly.

  ‘What evidence?’

  ‘It will appear in my report.’

  The Governor sat for a moment or two, thinking.

  ‘I don’t believe there is any such evidence,’ he said at last.

  Dmitri merely smiled.

  ‘As for your charge of obstruction …’

  ‘The public will, of course, want to know why the authorities at Tiumen found it necessary to resort to obstruction. Was it to cover up administrative error? Or was it …?’

  The Governor flushed.

  ‘You are offensive, sir!’

  ‘I am merely stating the questions that will be asked.’

  ‘I deny that there has been any obstruction!’

  ‘Restriction of access: is not that obstruction?’

  ‘You have been shown every cell there is in the place!’

  ‘Cell, yes.’

  ‘I am afraid I do not understand what you are implying.’

  ‘Aren’t there other places where prisoners are?’

  ‘It may surprise you to know, young man,’ said the Governor with heavy sarcasm, ‘that our policy here is to keep prisoners in prison!’

  ‘What if they’re sick?’

  ‘They’re put in the infirmary.’

  ‘Well, then …’

  ‘The infirmary’, said the Governor crushingly, ‘counts as part of the prison.’

  ‘But it is not a part that I have been taken to.’

  ‘That is in your own interest. Disease, infection – ’

  ‘Nevertheless, it is a place which I would like to visit.’

  The Governor sat looking at him for quite some time.

  ‘I am prepared to consider a written application,’ he said at last.

  Dmitri thought he had won a kind of victory.

  ‘Here he is again!’ said the clerks jovially. ‘What is it this time, young Barin?’

  Young Barin, or young Lord, was what they called him, confident that they had the Governor’s nod not to take him too seriously.

  ‘The sick lists.’

  ‘What, again?’

  ‘Again,’ said Dmitri shortly, and settled down to go through them. They ran to a lot of pages. Well, maybe that was not surprising. Many of the prisoners would have been in prison for weeks, perhaps months, before being sentenced, and prisons were not healthy places. Tiumen was not the only prison where typhoid fever was endemic. And then there was the journey itself, which would have borne hard on the weaker prisoners. All the same, there were a lot of them.

  He could quite see why they had been glad of the help of the Milk-Drinkers. What did they do when there weren’t any, he wondered? Or were there always Milk-Drinkers?

  Perhaps, though, there weren’t usually as many sick as there had been on this convoy. On an impulse, he asked if he could see the sick lists for previous convoys. With much exaggerated shrugging of shoulders and raising of eyes to the heavens, the clerks produced them from the files. They were appreciably shorter. Was it something to do with the time of year? Dmitri asked if he could see the lists for the corresponding time in previous years. Yet more shrugging.

  ‘We’ve got other things to do besides look after you, you know.’

  Always the sick lists were shorter. The convoy that Anna Semeonova had travelled on had had an unusually large number of sick people.

  He looked again at the original list. Some of the names, but only a few, had descriptive entries against them: ‘lame’, for instance, or ‘pregnant’. Description was more common for the earlier names on the list, possibly because the guards had made the entries at the outset to save themselves the trouble of having to re-establish the facts as they went along.

  The names were not arranged in alphabetical or any other order. It looked as if a guard had simply gone round collecting names for his list. They appeared to have done this every morning or evening, for there were clear indications when one day’s entries ended and another’s began. There were a lot of names on the first day – perhaps there had been a general check at the outset in order to assign those unable to walk to carts – and then after that just a few each day until …

  On the ninth day there was an unusually long list of entries. None of them had any descriptions against them. There was merely a long list of names.

  Dmitri checked again carefully. There was no doubt that they had all been entered at the same time, at the same point in the convoy’s progress. Was it simply that someone else had been keeping a separate list, perhaps for a different part of the convoy, and that at that point the lists had been consolidated? Or …

  Surely everyone couldn’t have fallen ill together! Food poisoning, water? He turned the pages over. There was nothing to indicate why so many had gone down all together. What was it that had happened on the ninth day of the march?

  Dmitri applied to the clerks.

  ‘Is a log-book kept of the convoy?’

  ‘Log-book?’

  ‘Daily record of events.’

  ‘There aren’t any events on a convoy.’

  ‘Escapes, accidents – ’

  ‘There aren’t any escapes. And accidents happen all the time.’

  ‘Suppose there was a really big accident; would that be reported?’

  The clerks looked at each other.

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘A report would go to the Governor, I expect.’

  ‘Is a report regularly made to the Governor when the convoy gets in?’

  ‘I expect so.’

  ‘Can I see it?’

  ‘You’d have to ask the Governor.’

  Dmitri went to see the Governor’s secretary.

  ‘Report? Oh, yes. First thing when the convoy gets in.’

  ‘In writing?’

  ‘Not always. Not when there’s nothing much to report.’

  ‘Was a report made in writing this time?’

  The secretary hesitated just long enough for Dmitri to raise his eyebrows.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can I see it?’

  ‘You would have to apply for permission in writing,’ said the secretary, recovering.

  Dmitri did so. The reply came later that afternoon. Scrawled on his application in the Governor’s handwriting
were the words: Irrelevant to inquiries. Permission refused.

  Dmitri went into the yard to look for Timofei. He found him sitting by himself with his back against the wall.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Found your girl yet?’

  ‘Still looking,’ said Dmitri. He dropped down beside the Milk-Drinker.

  ‘Timofei,’ he said, ‘were you on the convoy that’s just got in?’

  ‘Yes. About a week ago.’

  ‘That’s right. Were you the only Milk-Drinker in the convoy?’

  ‘Oh, no. There were half a dozen of us.’

  ‘How was that?’

  ‘They came to the village and rounded us up.’

  ‘The ones who hadn’t paid their taxes?’

  ‘It wasn’t quite like that. Not this time. It was those of us who had put our names to a petition.’

  ‘What was the petition?’

  ‘It was asking for the release of the elders. They had come to the village before, see, and taken the elders, or most of them, when we were refusing to pay our taxes. I was about the only one left. So this time they took me. And the women who’d put their names to the petition. It had to be women, see, because they were about the only ones who were left. Bar me.’

  There were quite a lot of points here that Dmitri wanted to take up. Arresting people for not paying their taxes he could see, just; but merely for signing a petition? If that, of course, was all they had done. He would have liked to have given them some legal advice. These people were plainly in need of a lawyer. He would have to come back to it with Timofei. However, he mustn’t allow himself to be sidetracked.

  ‘So, the other Milk-Drinkers on the convoy were all women?’

  ‘Yes. We were all sentenced together,’ said Timofei benignly. He seemed completely philosophical about the whole thing, as if it was something to be endured, not resisted. Or perhaps he had resisted? Perhaps his way of resisting was not paying taxes. Again, there were points here that Dmitri would have liked to take up. However…

  ‘Were you with the women on the convoy?’

  ‘At first, yes. We all walked together singing psalms to keep our spirits up. But then they wanted to separate us. They said it wasn’t decent to have the women with the men. But I said that Marya had just had a baby and needed help. Then they said if I was her husband, we’d all better travel with the family convoy. And I said I wasn’t her husband. Then they said what the hell was I to do with it in that case? And I said we were all bidden to help one another. And then the guards told the sergeant not to bother about it, that I was a Milk-Drinker and wouldn’t be a nuisance. So they let me go on with the women.’